the other Sturdza would not honor his promise. He still had his own thoughts on European affairs, and in December 1896 insisted that "Romania should find support in Russia". This remark was disputed by Foreign Minister Constantin Stoicescu, who noted that the country needed to remain neutral in the Oriental crises. The Beizadeas political irrelevancy was signaled in 1898 by cartoonist Nicolae Petrescu Găină, who depicted him as an Ottoman relic, adding the caption: "He was once something, what can he be now?" According to Radu Rosetti: "In his youth, Beizadea Grigore passed for a Neronian character; we, those who met him towards the end, never had that impression". He recalls his 1894 visit to the Lozonschi villa, which the Beizadea had fitted with massively oversized furniture. The building, he notes, was "in a state of ruin". According to Cantacuzène, Sturdza "lived in the only wing that was still holding together", a state of decay that was also noticeable in his retinue: Sturdza had "a dilapidated carriage, driven by a coachman in a threadbare livery that was too long and too wide for him". Political writer Mariu Theodorian-Carada recalls a chance meeting with Sturdza at Hotel Carol in Constanța, in July 1891. He was struck by the former Pasha's "mahogany beard" and 1870s clothes. The Beizadeas final years were mostly dedicated to experimental science, leading him to become a founding member of the Société astronomique; as reported by Klumpke, he had since taken a degree from the École normale supérieure, studying under Louis Pasteur. Over thirty years, Sturdza investigated the "fundamental laws of the Universe", producing the eponymous tract Lois fondamentales de l'univers (1891). Though described by scholar as "perhaps the only systematic encyclopedic work with just one author, a Romanian", it was allegedly ghostwritten in part by a professional astronomer, Constantin Căpităneanu, who died in 1893. A sequel, L'Ordre moral ("Moral Order"), also outlined his philosophical inquiry about the "ideal religion". Overall, Sturdza's ideas on such topics were admired by Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer and parapsychologist, garnering a more ambiguous response from physicist Jacques Babinet. One of the tenets of the books was a hypothesis on astrochemistry, with Sturdza calculating "that there are ninety-three nonillions of trentillions of atoms condensed in the eighty million stars, or altogether one-hundred and eight-six nonillions of trentillions of atoms". Sturdza also continued to work in designing flying machines with "cardboard wings" which