Mateiu Caragiale's personal life has for long attracted interest for the traces it left in his literary work. This is enhanced by his reputation for being a secretive man. In a late interview, Cella Delavrancea described him as "made up of [...] small patches, so well sewn together that one never knew what he had said, what he had meant to say, what he is thinking." While Ionel Gherea suspected that Caragiale was merely acting, Eugen Lovinescu, who described Caragiale's personality as "bizarre", also referred to him as "colorful and sterile." Despite his hectic lifestyle, Caragiale feared poverty and lashed out at Bohemianism, stressing that "it kills, and many times not just figuratively". In tandem, fragments of his writings and private records are thought by cultural historian Andrei Oișteanu to show intimate familiarity with substance abuse and the drug subculture of his age, in addition to his self admitted binge drinking. During his final years of life, he was harvesting an unspecified wild herb from the hills of Cotroceni neighborhood, and using it as a sedative. By then, essayist Ion Vartic notes, Caragiale's obsession with death had developed into "neurosis".