How! Wouldst thou clear rebellion?

I grew a mantle of radar, sensitized to the blindsidings and the character-ambush attempts.

[…] Corporal Cornichon, walking straight up to the bar, tutoyering me all the time in the most horridly familiar manner, clapped me on the back, and asked me to take a glass of cognac with him.

In the Gaul of the early sixth century, to reassure monks that they could be bishops meant persuading them that the wealth of the church had come to stay. It was there. The only issue was how to deal with it. [Julianus] Pomerius went out of his way to prove that involvement with the wealth of the church need not pollute them or detract from their spiritual life. It was possible to be both a contemplative and an administrator. The tantalizing disjuncture between the wealth of the church and the studied wealthlessness of its nominal owner, the bishop, was central to Pomerius's argument. Pomerius insisted that the wealth of the church could be administered—indeed, even increased—by persons inspired by the austere distinction between wealth and its mere managers delineated by the old Augustine.