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all its attendant protocol, meant for the emperor alone, without realising he was making a mistake. His guest bowed to thank him but, moments later, was packing his bags, and it was only when he came into Puyi’s study with his suitcase and said a simple ‘Goodbye’ in Sanskrit that light dawned in the emperor’s mind and, understanding the absurdity of his mistake, he was filled with elation and laughed till he wept. He experienced similar sensual ecstasy when his wife—a general’s daughter he had married six years earlier and to whom he vowed platonic love, although he did not truly know her sweet face or her tender body—came into his study disguised as a young Indian prince, sat on his lap, covered his face in kisses and whispered in his ear: ‘sā bhāryā yā pativratā,’ a Sanskrit sentence which he had made her learn by heart in the tomb-like chill of her bedroom, impregnated by a strong smell of opium, and which could be translated as: ‘me wife devoted to my husband.’
    “But time had run out for Puyi to use the words of this sacred language, which he had learned so quickly and with such appetite as an effective means of defence. Events took an ironic turn when two Japanese officers, in civilian dress, came to fetch him and take him out to a car parked by the front door of his residence (for the rest of his life he would remember the squeak of that car’s brakes and the furtive sound of footsteps—or rather the absence of any sound of footsteps—made by those two ghosts). He struggled to keep his composure and, with all the dignity of a head of state, responded to the officers’ military salute by uttering, syllable by syllable, the longest Sanskrit sentence he knew by heart: Brāhmanah Kalaham asahamāno bhāryāvatsalyāt svakutumbam parityajya brāhmanyā saya desāntaram gatah (‘After his house was abandoned, unable to bear the disagreement any longer, out of love for his wife, the Brahman fled with her to a foreign country’). After such an exploit and having surprised even himself, Puyi was overcome with joy and experienced patriotic pride for the last time in his life, particularly as, although they understood absolutely nothing, the two ghosts from the land of the Rising Sun had bowed before him on three separate occasions during this interminable sentence.
    “But when it came to saying goodbye to his scholarly guest he again used an inappropriate Sanskrit formula without realising it. For reasons of intellectual integrity, his embarrassed guest reminded him that he should have used the term meaning ‘goodbye,’ and not the one for ‘hello’ in the present tense. Puyi, who had managed to keep his madness in check up until this point thanks to Sanskrit, succumbed to a violent fit of hysteria and, shaking like a leaf, called the man every abusive name he could think of so that their farewell scene descended into nightmare. An hour later, at the airfield, his anger subsided when the sumo, the only person permitted to travel with him, appeared with two padlocked, chrome-plated metal chests, which bounced glints of sunlight round the stark, tattered and uncomfortable cabin. He put them down opposite the emperor on an iron seat with cracking dark green paint. These two chests—one filled with works of art counted among the most precious treasures in China if not the world, the other quite priceless, once the property of Emperor Huizong and now Puyi—were cited as exhibits years later by an international tribunal, proving Puyi was not innocent: he had prepared his departure and had, therefore, been guilty of treason when he stepped into that Japanese aircraft. A crime that was all the more shameful for being premeditated.
    “The six other people on board—a pilot, two co-pilots, the two officers and the sumo—died during the war without leaving any testimony about the incident which happened inside the plane when Puyi, gripped with sudden madness, opened the cabin door in mid-air and