Once on a Moonless Night Read Online Free

‘meditation on painting,’ as Puyi called it, ended in a spectacular episode, not devoid of an element of comedy: late in November 1926, towards the end of a snowy night, some courtiers were horrified to spot Puyi, who was twenty at the time, in the feeble morning light, his frail naked body wrapped in a long boa of black and white feathers as he perched, shivering, on the branch of an elm tree just like the bird painted by Huizong eight hundred years earlier. Not one of his servants dared approach him, except for the sumo, the only person allowed to enter his study (strictly out of bounds to anyone else) so that he could put more wood on the fire in winter and stand behind him mutely waving a fan in summer. No one will ever know what degree of intimacy there was between the young fallen emperor and his Japanese sumo but, if the recollections of one of the last eunuchs in Tianjin are to be believed, every time Puyi descended into unshakeable lethargy after a hysterical outburst, the sumo would lie down beside him in his bed and hold him in his arms, day and night. But on the morning in question when the sumo reached out to his master to take him in his arms, the elm branch—which had already bowed considerably under Puyi’s weight—snapped with a deafening crack and both men fell, in each others arms, though neither was injured thanks to the snow on the ground in the courtyard.
    “Another singular detail is that Huizong, himself a painter and calligrapher, was also a great collector or even the greatest ever, an area that no doubt requires vast wealth but also a knowledge of art, in a word: taste. Even I, who am no artist,” the professor confided, “have read and reread once a year the catalogues of Huizong’s collection, which list six thousand and three hundred works with their titles, descriptions, painters’ biographies and, most importantly, the emperors own comments, piecing together the genesis of each creation. Almost all of these works have now disappeared, but reading the catalogues affords the same pleasure as looking at an old map of a town or neighbourhood, where the observer can wander through imaginary remains, recognising crossroads, losing his way in a market, following the course of a moat, looking out for its ripples along the sinuous outline of city walls, although it will vanish the moment he feels he has grasped it. Can you understand why a great wave of happiness washed over me when, looking at an enlarged photograph, I spotted the titles of two works from this mythical catalogue on the label of a chest that was handed down to Huizong and later belonged to our last emperor?
    “The first was a piece of calligraphy by Li Bo, the great poet of the Tang dynasty, an autograph transcription of his poem ‘The Terrace of the Sun’ on hemp paper. Three centuries lie between Li Bo and Huizong, but in his day, as in ours, men of letters were divided into two camps, those who loved Li Bo and those who admired Du Fu, another great poet of the Tang dynasty and an intimate friend of Li Bo. Huizong clearly belonged to the first camp, since, according to the catalogue of his collection, he owned six autograph works of calligraphy by Li Bo (six poems he had written), two in semi-cursive script and executed at the palace before his emperor, who had commissioned them, the other four in full-blown cursive script, and all of them, judging by their titles, eulogies to alcohol improvised in a drunken state and which Huizong—with a flourish that went beyond his role as an expert—annotated with these words: ‘Li Bo and alcohol, ever running to meet each other, became so interchangeable that eventually, like a vanishing apparition, they formed just one creature, compact yet ill-defined, and quite unique.’
    “I couldn’t help doing some research on the poem called ‘The Terrace of the Sun,’” said the professor. “What a journey it must have had, through all the political upheavals, the founding and