Damsel Mamuca

excerpt Doctor Tucia, a young man of about twenty-three or twenty-four, tall, slender, swarthy, with a crooked nose, big eyes and bushy brows, and a pretty well outlined forehead, had one of those faces that are likeable and seem beautiful at first sight, especially to someone who is not a versed judge of physiognomies. Yet, to a connoisseur it looked repulsive because of a little something egotistic, mean, cunning, a little something imprinted in the lines on his forehead, in the bend of his nose, in the contour of his lips, his wry smile, fiery eyes, and, finally, stamped on everything and impossible to analyze in detail. A major disadvantage with women is that they absolutely evince no profoundness of spirit. Judging things on the surface only, they shouted: Monsieur Tucia est charmant, so Monsieur Tucia had, in a matter of months, become the favorite doctor of women. Tucia was giving a medicine course when I was admitted at the School of Law. We met at the residence of Baron von R., where all the parasites in the university had a seat...at the table, as they were loath to dine on their own...spending money from their very purses. One day, the guests started to recount, in turn, their first love. One described in Homeric terms reminding of Eumaeus, the swineherd in the Odyssey, the noose that his old man's housekeeper had put round his neck, and how his auntie's puppy had barked at him since it, seemingly, had never before seen people lassoed. Another, after a lengthy philosophical-pedagogical foreword, lamented to have been introduced to an honorable widow, who lived on an uncertain income, by her very unworthy French tutor. A third admitted with naive frankness that he no longer remembered the time, place and circumstances of his first assault... When my turn came I spoke thus: "There are about four years, gentlemen, since I first tasted from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A mother had a daughter, and the mother and the girl lived in a house close to my father's. I used to call on them. The platonic love affair with the girl went too far. "At midnight," she told me eventually, "come to my room through the window." Who knows what happened, the girl's mother must have been spying on us, and heard the girl's words. At the appointed hour I found the window open and I stole into the room, and asked: "Is this you, Emilia?" "Come slowly!" I heard a whisper. We got into the bed. The rest you imagine, gentlemen. But what you cannot imagine is my surprise when Emilia began to give indications: "Not like that...like this..." etc. After three hours spent in unspeakable ecstasy, my teacher dismissed me, again through the window, lest "the old woman" wake up. The following day I saw my true Emilia. Figure my stupefaction when I heard her say she had not been able to wait for me: "My old woman shut me in her chambers and went to sleep by herself who knows where." I instantly realized then who had been my tutor: mother had replaced daughter... you know, gentlemen, what could have been the age of the hardy mother? Fifty-seven years, three months and eight days! I did this computation on the basis of the original matrix! The table rang with thunderous laughter. "I drink to the health of N. N. and of quasi-Emilia!" a tenor student cried. "I'm no longer dumbfounded at the youth's consummate arte amandi. He had a good teacher!" exclaimed a youth in a bass voice. "This is downright unique!" screamed a soprano student. "Don't be surprised, gentlemen," Tucia interjected at once, standing up and tending his hand to me over the table. "I'm a blood brother of N. N. I too stumbled on a mother instead of a daughter! Only that the girl's name was Amalia, not Emilia." From that moment Tucia seemed to become my closest buddy although I had never invited him to dinner, because my budget did not allow for extraordinary expenditure. After a week, out of friendship, he revealed to me a secret that everybody knew but which eventually would lead me to another secret, unknown to all. He had a mistress of whom he ignored how to rid himself. "I promised," the good doctor said, "that I'd marry her the day I became a doctor... I promised before witnesses... but you understand it would be sheer madness on my part to forsake thus my future once and for all. She's a seamstress... what can be done?" "In order to be able to give you proper advice I should meet her, penetrate her character..." "My dear, penetrate all you want, I would be delighted if she found you attractive..."  Following a stormy youth in pursuit of sexual adventure and strewn with binges, orgies, and even a duel and a war campaign in Crimea, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu (1838-1907), a Childe Harold in Moldavian-Russian-Polish attire (and a scholarly Casanova), lost his government jobs, even if he badly needed them, in the wake of a trial triggered by his publishing of Damsel Mamuca (1863). Hasdeu's encyclopedism, encompassing many areas, from history and philology to ethnography and numismatics, acknowledged by universities and academic societies around the world, was superseded, after his genius daughter, Iulia's untimely death, by a wasteful inclination to mysticism and spiritualism.


by B. P. Hasdeu (1838-1907)