A first-person narrative, "Craii de Curtea-Veche" traces and satirizes Romanian society in the early decades of the 20th century (it probably depicts events from ca. 1910). A core group of three persons, all withdrawn, Epicurean and decadent figures, allow the intrusion of Gore Pirgu, a low-class and uncultured self-seeker, whose character comes to embody the new political class of Greater Romania. Researcher Constantin Amăriuței proposed that there is an intrinsic connection between Pirgu and Mitică, a voluble clerk depicted in several sketch stories by Ion Luca Caragiale, and best remembered as a stereotype of Bucharesters; according to Amăriuței, Pirgu is "the eternal and real Mitică of the Romanian world". According to Matei Călinescu, the story is intertextually shaped by two of Ion Luca's prose works: one of them, titled "Inspecțiune..." ("Inspection..."), is part of the Mitică cycle, while the other, "Grand Hotel "Victoria română"", is one of the earliest depictions of anxiety in the literature of Romania. For Matei Călinescu, Pirgu and the other protagonists stand as allegories for a set of essentially Romanian traits that, he argues, were still observable in the early 21st century.