from the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Bucharest, chose to stay behind while the authorities and many ordinary citizens relocated to Iași, where resistance was still being organized. His stance was interpreted as collaborationism by his critics. However, Macedonski reportedly faced extreme poverty throughout the occupation. Having by then begun to attend the circle of Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești, his promoter and fellow Germanophile, he was once rewarded by the latter with a turkey filled with gold coins. Late polemics, illness and death Literatorul resumed print in June 1918, once Romania capitulated to the Central Powers under the Treaty of Bucharest. A controversial incident occurred soon afterwards, when, going against the counsel of his friend and collaborator Stamatiad, Macedonski signed a Literatorul article where the German military administrator August von Mackensen, who was about to lead his troops out of Romania, was presented in a positive light. In a manner deemed "excessive" by historian Lucian Boia, the Romanian writer was paying homage not just to Mackensen, but also, indirectly, to German Emperor Wilhelm II and the Reichsheer. Soon after reading the piece, Romanian Academy member and fellow Symbolist promoter Ovid Densusianu withdrew his own nomination of Macedonski for an academy seat. During summer, Macedonski also joined the group of public figures who saluted the senior Conservative Germanophile Petre P. Carp (deeming Carp "the veteran of character, honesty and Romanianism"), and, in September, joined Ioan Slavici and Gala Galaction as a contributor to the occupation magazine Rumänien in Wort und Bild, where he prophesied an anti-French "political renaissance" of Romania. Alexandru Macedonski faced problems after the Romanian government resumed its control over Bucharest, and during the early years of Greater Romania. What followed the Mackensen article, Vianu claims, was Macedonski's bellum contra omnes ("war against all"). However, the poet made efforts to accommodate himself with the triumphal return of the Iași authorities: in December 1918, Literatorul celebrated the extension of Romanian rule "from the Tisza to the Dniester" as a success of the National Liberals, paying homage to Francophile political leaders Ion I. C. Brătianu and Take Ionescu. Macedonski also envisaged running in the 1918 election for a seat in the new Parliament (which was supposed to vote a document to replace the 1866 Constitution as the organic law), but never registered his candidature. According to Vianu, he had intended to create a joke political party, the "intellectual group", whose other member was an