from the literary conferences presented in Iași by Titu Maiorescu, the Junimea doyen, and "greatly enjoyed" Negruzzi's work in political satire. Sturdza however insisted that the Petition be signed by all right-wingers in the Assembly; Junimist deputies, also based in Iași, only agreed to sign parts of the document. Used by the opposition to ridicule the "Whites" (Telegraphulŭ newspaper referred to Sturdza and his colleagues as "boyars, parvenus of the regime, and scoundrels" who had unmasked their reactionary agenda), the Petition was in fact ignored by Catargiu. Sturdza still tried to win over the public with his demands, touring all of Western Moldavia in the summer of 1871. Hasdeu claimed that the concurrent election was overall rigged, since aristocrats such as Sturdza and Maiorescu had been elected by peasant voters in the 4th College; conservative groups also celebrated his personal contribution in ensuring success for "official candidates", though they noted that this was the result of procedures which Sturdza simply upheld. The former Beizadea was himself continuously elected to either the Assembly or the Senate, for all legislatures down to his death. As a personal friend of Catargiu's, Sturdza was depicted by "Iași's newspapers" as a "most energetic pillar of the party of order and stability on that side of the Milcov." In 1874, the Beizadeas established in Iași a "Landlords' Club", which was probably co-founded by Epureanu. Its creation was received with alarm by Ionescu de la Brad, who noted that Sturdza was mostly interested in using a nominal association of agricultural interests for his political scheming. Rumors rendered by Ionescu suggest that Sturdza had created himself an appendant body of Freemasonry, and that many inductees quit upon realizing that they were being used. Overall, only a minority of the club's members could be counted as property owners. Mostly used for dance parties, it became "only from time to time, and for a few days on end, a political and conservative club." Another one of Sturdza's leading passions was in constructing early flying machines. In 1875, he used his father's Lozonschi house as a hangar for his glider. A friend of his, a gymnastics professor known as Spinzi, attempted to pilot it from a tower in Cristești, but the launch ended in failure. This remains one of the earliest documented fixed-wing flight attempts by a Romanian, between those of Constantin Nestor (1765) and Ion Stoica (1884). Sturdza had by