(25.03.1885 – 17.01.1936)If you had passed through St. Gheorghe square a few years ago, you could have seen a man immediately catching the eye by the way he looked. It was a dry winter, crisp snow under your feet. The man, who was around 45-50 years of age, had an upright manner, seemed sturdy and bony but not fat. He had probably been thinner before, and his age had now conveyed to him that dignity of the volume mature people have. The flax muscles of his shaven face had tensed it in a solemn image of pride. His clothing was obviously insufficient for that season, although one could see that it was not penury, but the wish of maintaining a uniform attire that determined this choice. On his head he was wearing a bowler-hat laid rigidly on like a semi-top-hat, on his body an overcoat or a light semi-topcoat. His thin, correct boots, tied up with outdated buttons, were stepping directly onto the snow. The green of his bowler hat and semi-topcoat was calling old over-polished garments to mind, although the man's outfit displayed a strung up correctness of great circumstance. The contrast between this odd man and the rest of the passers-by was so striking that one instantly thought of an impoverished misfit of a boyar, of one of those archeological aristocrats full of airs, who fight the mould of years and whom Cocteau saw all around Empress Eugenia of Montijo. However, there was something which did not completely go along with this hypothesis. Despite his cultivated, refined look, the man was too rigid in the protocol of his gait to be a pure aristocrat. There was a cold affectation in the downward tendency of his jaws. At this point you could not help thinking of those old servants of the great aristocracy, their own family trees proving the purity of their ancillary vocation, of those servants whom the masses take for masters, whilst the masters are taken for servants due to their false sloppiness, and who ask for information about the house they are going to be employed in, lest they should descend from their pedestal. He could have been a butler in his Sunday holiday (it was actually Sunday), and then the green of his clothes found its explanation in the fact that a man such as he, usually in his livery, would keep a civilian suit for years.However, the butler was Mateiu I. Caragiale, one of the great dramatist I. L. Caragiale's sons. 1941
by George Călinescu (1899-1965)
