Once on a Moonless Night Read Online Free Page A

floundering of dynasties! After Huizong was exiled, the work disappeared, then re-emerged in the Yuan dynasty, at first in the hands of Yan Qin, then Ou Yangxuan (1274-1358), the famous master of the Imperial Archives, then it disappeared again, only to reappear three centuries later in the Ming dynasty in the catalogue of Xiang Zijing, the famous collector, before becoming the property, some time in the late sixteenth century, of the Qing emperors, Puyi’s ancestors. Calligraphy may well be simply an artistic version of another form, that is the ideograms which make up the poem, but then not only does it reflect the character and temperament of the artist but (you can believe me on this) it also betrays his heart rate, his breathing and the alcohol on his breath, and all this affords the enthusiast a feeling of euphoria comparable to that of a music lover discovering or, better still, acquiring a two-hundred-year-old recording of a Beethoven piano concerto played by Beethoven himself.
    “The hypnotic psychological effect of a piece of calligraphy or a painting (which, according to doctors, was in itself nothing short of miraculous in Puyi’s case) is, like all other artistic responses, only ever short-lived and was not enough to affect his pathological condition or to maintain a mental equilibrium, however fragile. And yet, unless I am mistaken, that is exactly what he did experience with the second treasure from Huizong’s collection—a manuscript on a roll of silk in a language that was not known at the time—an object that meant more to him than anything else in the world. The hypnotic power it exerted over him was such that, while Puyi had had the calligraphy by Li Bo hung beside his bed, he hardly ever looked at it, for he was quite incapable of tearing his eyes away from this scroll of manuscript.
    “I can see from your expression,” the professor remarked, “how interested you are in this roll and I feel I must put you on your guard before this interest becomes more passionate, as it has for anyone who has come close to the manuscript. I myself, I have to admit, developed a keen enthusiasm for it when I looked into its history, exhausting all available sources, some of which must be viewed with caution, for they are too closely tied up with legend; but I felt that by reconstituting its peregrinations, however tortuous a course they may have taken, I would be better equipped to talk about the late emperors on whom it had left its mark and to put together lost fragments from the lives of fallen nobility, such as Seventy-one, whom I mention in the book you have read. Time and again I regret the fact that, when it was published, your compatriot Paul d’Ampère had not yet come to China, that the paths of that noble madman and this manuscript had not yet crossed, depriving my book of a chapter that would have been more disturbing than all the others.
    “This precious roll is made up of two strips of silk sewn together with tiny stitching; the first of them contains the text in an unknown language and the silk is stained an orangey yellow. There is no indication of a date, but, from a scientific study of the weaving, it has been established that the stain was made using a concoction extracted from the bark of the Huangbo tree, characteristic of the Han dynasty, and analysis of the ink, which is of exceptional quality and has retained all the intensity of its strong dark black, seems to prove that this mysterious work probably dates from the second or third century of our era, which makes it the oldest roll preserved to date.
    “On the second strip, which is in more luxurious silk stained light blue, there is a long colophon of thirty columns of ivory-coloured Chinese ideograms, with calligraphy details by Huizong in gold dust—which still gleams in places—mixed with glue, a technique used in Buddhist temples for copying sacred texts. (Did Huizong have some premonition about the nature of this text written in