Mateiu I. Caragiale

Mateiu Ion Caragiale was born in Bucharest on March 25, 1885, the son of Ion Luca Caragiale, the most celebrated playwright in Romania, and Maria Constantinescu, a young clerk at the city's Town Hall, who were not married. He grew up in his father's household but never in his favour; relations between the two hardened into a lasting antipathy, and the son spent his life imagining a nobler ancestry than the one he had. At Sfântul Gheorghe college he fell for history and heraldry, and as a young man he styled himself, half in jest, Prince Bassaraba-Apaffy. In 1904 the family came into a large inheritance and moved to Berlin, where Mateiu was meant to study law and mostly read instead; he enrolled at the Bucharest law school twice and finished neither time. His father spent the fortune freely, and when he died in 1912 the son received very little. That same year Mateiu made his debut with thirteen poems in Viața Românească and entered the civil service, beginning a patchy career of ministry press posts and conservative politics that his pro-German stance during the First World War did nothing to help. His novella Remember, about a mysterious dandy in Berlin, appeared in 1921. In 1923 he married Marica Sion, daughter of the poet Gheorghe Sion and twenty-five years his senior, and became the owner of land at Fundulea. His great book, Craii de Curtea-Veche, written across a decade, serialized in Gândirea from 1926 to 1928 and published as a volume in 1929, follows a narrator and three companions through the restaurants, gambling tables and disreputable houses of old Bucharest, in prose thick with archaic, Turkish and Greek words. France made him a knight of the Légion d'honneur that year. He spent his last years on a detective novel, Sub pecetea tainei, which he never finished, and died of a stroke in Bucharest on January 17, 1936. In 2001 a poll of 102 Romanian critics named Craii, known in English as Rakes of the Old Court, the best Romanian novel of the twentieth century.

At the funeral of his father, the great playwright Ion Luca Caragiale, in 1912, Mateiu said in French: "Je suis venu voir feu mon père," I have come to see my late father. The pianist Cella Delavrancea was shocked. The writer Ion Vianu later called what the son felt for the father antipathy bordering on hatred.