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used by nomads. This letter fostered an infatuation with Sanskrit in Puyi, who was quite won over by its grammar, as it was explained to him by the scholar, or rather by one essential grammatical point, the only one that held his attention: in this very rich, very precise language, verbs existed only in the passive form. You could never say, for example: ‘The cook is preparing rice,’ but rather: ‘Rice is being prepared by the cook.’ Tormented by a feeling of failure and the thought that he would soon leave his residence and be no more than a puppet emperor in captivity, Puyi felt every sentence pronounced by the scholar resonating in his ears like some gentle incantatory formula, his every word opening a new doorway through which he alone could reach the skies with his magician by his side. In the space of an afternoon an idyllic world was born in his mind, a world where verbs—actions—were reduced to their passive form, thus making every kind of threat disappear. No gesture or movement had any meaning now other than submitting, like a virgin sheet of paper that accepts having print over its entire surface, sometimes even being deeply dented in the process.
    “That evening the Sanskrit scholar, exhausted by his new pupil’s ardour, took his leave immediately after dinner to sleep in one of the many empty bedrooms. Puyi, on the other hand, as he later recounted, spent a sleepless night learning the alphabet and a dozen or so Sanskrit words by heart, floundering in the contrast between long and short vowels, their solemn weight, the way they alternated, and in the framework of consonants, the voiced and unvoiced, the aspirates and the unvoiced aspirates. He even tried to compose a sentence—his first in Sanskrit—to taste the pleasures of passive experience and passive desire; he succeeded and it was beautiful. Then he discovered, and this too was beautiful, how to decline the concept of despair in the passive form and, better still, in passive past participles. Oh, the power of passivity!
    “He did not close his eyes until daybreak, sinking into a half sleep, and, in a fleeting fraction of a second, he saw two strangers leaning over him, one tall in a monk’s habit with a beard that completely covered his cheeks, the other small and slight, still young but with a greying goatee on the tip of his pointed chin. They disappeared just as they had appeared, before a single word had been exchanged. Only afterwards did Puyi recognise them as An Shih-Kao and Huizong, even though the latter had not been wearing an imperial headdress. He had two votive altars erected to them in a large hall in recognition of his gratitude for this first visit, which he saw as a very good omen, a mute baptism of the sacred language.
    “In the last fine days of autumn—which were also, although he did not know this yet, the last fine days of his apolitical life as emperor—to be sure that he could immerse himself in this language to which he was recently converted, whatever the time of day and wherever he might be (in his study, the dining room, the bathroom, the toilet, along a dark corridor, in the disused ballroom or the deserted courtyard), he gave his guest, the professor, sheets of white paper and asked him to write out the names of almost everything in Sanskrit, as in the village struck down with amnesia in One Hundred Years of Solitude . His servants copied out the labels in whitewash letters a hundred times the size on the ground, the walls, doors, windows, armchairs, beds … even the sumo, who pinned the words raja purusa , ‘the emperors servant,’ on his capacious tunic. For the first time in a long while Puyi could be heard roaring with laughter again, yes, real laughter, in his falsetto voice, granted, but glorious laughter which filled the gloomy house with joy. One morning he met his scholarly visitor in a corridor and greeted him in Sanskrit but, instead of saying ‘Good morning,’ he employed a polite formula with