life." Another poem, Noaptea de aprilie ("April Night"), was probably his testimony of unrequited love for Aristizza Romanescu. Realism and Naturalism By the 1880s, Macedonski developed and applied his "social poetry" theory, as branch of Realism. Explained by the writer himself as a reaction against the legacy of Lamartine, it also signified his brief affiliation with the Naturalist current, a radical segment of the Realist movement. Traian Demetrescu thus noted that Macedonski cherished the works of French Naturalists and Realists such as Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola. During this phase, Macedonski made known his sympathy for the disinherited, from girls forced into prostitution to convicts sentenced to penal labor on salt mines, and also spoke out against the conventionalism of civil marriages. His Ocnele ("The Salt Mines") includes the verdict: Naturalist depiction was also the main element in his prose pieces of the early 1880s. Among them was the first of several sketch stories using still life techniques, Casa cu nr. 10 (according to Zamfir, a prime sample of Macedonski's "ornamental" genre). With Între cotețe, Dramă banală and later Cometa lui Odorescu ("Odorescu's Comet"), Macedonski speaks about his own biography. The former has for a protagonist Pandele Vergea, a thirty-five-year-old man who is consumed by an avicultural obsession, who dreams of turning into a bird, and who is eventually maimed by his overcrowded fowls. In contrast, Dereanu is a bohemian university student, possessed by dreams of military and political glory, and who meditates about his future in front of Heliade Rădulescu's statue or in Bucharest cafés. Also a bohemian, Odorescu announces his discovery of a comet, before being proved wrong by his aunt, an ordinary woman. Some pieces also double as memoirs: in Dramă banală, the plot revolves around Macedonski's recollection of the 1866 plebiscite. Vianu draws attention to the picturesque depiction of historic Bucharest, a contributing element in Cometa..., Casa cu nr. 10 and Între cotețe. With Unchiașul Sărăcie (also written in verse), Macedonski took Naturalist tenets into the field of drama. Frédéric Damé believed it an imitation of a play by Ernest d'Hervilly and Alfred Grévin, but, Vianu argues, the Romanian text was only loosely based on theirs: in Macedonski's adaptation, the theme became fairy tale-like, and used a speech style based on Romanian folklore. Around the time of its completion, Macedonski was also working on a similarly loose adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, which notably