encouraged the—unsustainable—rumor that he was a direct descendant of an ancient Wallachian ruling house, the Basarab Princes. According to at least one account, Bogdan-Pitești was educated in Geneva, at a local Catholic institution. Raised in the Romanian Orthodox faith, he converted to Catholicism in his twenties, but was no longer a practicing Catholic by the time of his death. He supposedly attended medical school at the University of Montpellier, without ever graduating, and afterwards left to join the bohemian milieu of Paris. He may have enrolled at the University of Paris, studying Law and Letters, but probably withdrew after a short while. Art historian Sanda Miller recounts that Bogdan-Pitești attended the École des Beaux-Arts in the French capital, but that he was ultimately expelled. Other sources express doubt that the Romanian aristocrat was ever affiliated with any university or college, in either France or Switzerland. According to literary historian Tudor Vianu, at that stage, the young man began associating with the criminal underworld. He soon established a connection with the French anarchist circles, while also associating with a branch of the growing Symbolist movement. Like others in his generation, he may have been driven by a desire for shocking and morbid experiences. According to art historian Theodor Enescu, these ranged from erotic experimentation to the "boisterous shivers of anarchism", and from criminal enterprise to decadent poetry. Bogdan-Pitești was a presence in the anarchist group of Auguste Vaillant (later guillotined for plotting a terrorist coup), and was possibly acquainted with some of the more prestigious anarchist intellectuals: Élisée Reclus, Laurent Tailhade and (especially influential on him) Félix Fénéon. Reports exist that Bogdan-Pitești's politics were already a merger of opposite or hardly compatible doctrines. He respected Catholicism and Judaism as the most elevated religious cultures, rejected Orthodoxy, atheism and communism as ideologies for the mediocre, and depicted himself as a Catholic anarchist. He believed in craniometry, and took scientific racism at face value. At some stage during the late 1880s, Bogdan-Pitești became a supporter of General Boulanger, who attempted to gain power in France with support from the Orléanist, Bonapartist and socialist camps; he reputedly befriended the prominent Boulangist and Romantic nationalist thinker Maurice Barrès. In parallel, he himself became a representative of literary and artistic Symbolism, and supposedly maintained contacts with authors such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Maurice Maeterlinck, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Moréas, and Paul Verlaine. Another influence on him was the