“Agilulf passed by, attentive, nervous and proud; people’s bodies gave him a disagreeable feeling resembling envy, but also a stab of pride, of contemptuous superiority.”
“He was a better officer than many who vaunted themselves illustrious, the best of all officers, in fact. Yet there he was, walking unhappily in the night.”
“Here were his famous colleagues, the glorious paladins, but what were they? Here was their armor, proof of rank and name, of feats of power and worth, all reduced to a shell, to empty iron, and there lay the men themselves, snoring away, faces thrust into pillows with a thread of spittle dribbling from open lips.”
“What it was like to shut one’s eyes, lose consciousness, plunge into emptiness for a few hours and then wake up and find oneself the same as before, linked with the threads of one’s life again, Agilulf could not know...”
″‘Well, well! Who’d have thought it!’ exclaimed Charlemagne. ‘And how do you do your job, then, if you don’t exist?’
‘By will power,’ said Agilulf, ‘and faith in our holy cause.‘”
“Agilulf Emo Bertrandin of the Guildivern and of the Others of Corbentraz and Sura, Knight of Selimpia Citeriore and Fez, was certainly a model soldier, but disliked by all.”