In his permanent search for nobility rights, occasionally ascribed to the inferiority complex of illegitimate children, he indicated that his mother's origins were in Austria-Hungary: before his marriage to Marica Sion, he claimed that he had lost his birth certificate, and, upon completing a new one, that his mother resided in Vienna, and that he himself had been born in the Transylvanian town of Tușnad. In Tudor Vianu's view, Caragiale's quest for "an elective heredity" saw him joining a diverse group of writers with similar interests, among whom were Balzac, Arthur de Gobineau, and Stefan George. Commenting that "heredity has, after all, only the value of a psychological fact", he stressed: " thus had the right to seek his ancestry on the ascents of history and even to be ready to believe, from time to time, that he had found it."