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May it comfort us latter-day scramblers up that fine old mountain to know that Le Conte found it difficult and fatiguing in the extreme.

What really matters within the overall plot is that while Sam, who is 57, tries to clear his son, he meets his son's former lover, Jacqueline, who was a very young French operative during the war and still is very young shortly after it. They begin an affair. […] There is a pseudoincest factor ripe enough to raise a jaded Freud's eyebrows and just as many twists of fate to fool even Tiresias.

The cuffs, or epimanikia, which fit over the sticharion, bear little or no resemblance to the maniple.