Diabolical pact-maker losing head before exercising severe self-discipline

Usage examples of austere.

This was a measure designed to root out the Catholic heresy of Jansenism, which took a much more austere view of salvation than the acceptable norm, and which had adherents at high levels of the Parlements, especially in Paris.

Not content with her own private obsession she cast her husband in the role of Wolmar, the older, rather austere but devoted figure whom Julie dutifully marries in preference to the besotted young tutor Saint-Preux.

Sainte-Genevieve was thought suitable because its austere neoclassicism seemed to project the virtues associated with the philosophers and patriotic statesmen.

While Robespierre deliberately worked alone, cultivating, Jean-Jacques-like, the austere isolation of the prophet, the Girondins played off each other like members of a string quartet, the cadence and tempo of their transcendent rhetoric rising and falling, swelling and fading with the effect they had on each other.

I know that the austere language of truth is rarely welcomed near the throne but I also know that it is because it is so rarely heard that revolutions become necessary.

That this magistrate of austere appearance may have committed a crime in no way permits me to know him better.

Zeus, but to Mars Gradivus, god of long campaigns and austere discipline, or to grave Numa, inspired by the gods.

I was finishing this little analysis of the case when the door was opened and the austere figure of the great dermatologist was ushered in.

The door opened to admit a thin, austere figure with a hatchet face and drooping mid-Victorian whiskers of a glossy blackness which hardly corresponded with the rounded shoulders and feeble gait.

Holmes had spent several days in bed, as was his habit from time to time, but he emerged that morning with a long foolscap document in his hand and a twinkle of amusement in his austere gray eyes.

The door had opened and the page had shown in a tall, clean-shaven man with the firm, austere expression which is only seen upon those who have to control horses or boys.

He was not disappointed, for presently the old fellow arrived with a very worried and puzzled expression upon his austere face.

It had been assembled twenty-five years previously when the first colonists arrived, and its austere fittings were showing their age.

A ridge of electrophorescent cells circling the pad were casting an austere light over the spaceplane.

It was the head of a mediaeval saint, austere and beautiful, sharp as a cameo against its own black shadow.