It seems that unscrupulous individuals like himself become necessary when states get into trouble and have to pass through political, financial, and moral crises.

It is said that Sacco with his imperturbable assurance and ingenious and resourceful mind has quite won the King's favour.

Just look at him! Why, with that crowd of courtiers round him, one might think him the master of this palace!" And indeed the guests, after passing the Prince and Princess with a bow, at once congregated around Sacco, for he represented power, emoluments, pensions, and crosses; and if folks still smiled at seeing his dark, turbulent, and scraggy figure amidst that framework of family portraits which proclaimed the mighty ancestry of the Buongiovannis, they none the less worshipped him as the personification of the new power, the democratic force which was confusedly rising even from the old Roman soil where the _patriziato_ lay in ruins.
"What a crowd!" muttered Pierre.

"Who are all these people ?" "Oh!" replied Narcisse, "it is a regular mixture.

These people belong neither to the black nor the white world; they form a grey world as it were.