"Father, feeling in myself an ardent desire to sacrifice myself to God, as a victim in union with our Lord Jesus Christ, immolated on our altars, and to spend my life in perpetual adoration of His divine Sacrament, under the observance of the rule of our glorious Father Saint Benedict, I humbly ask of you the grace of the holy habit."
"I will give it you willingly if you believe you can conform your life to that of a victim devoted to the Holy Sacrament."
"I trust so, leaning on the infinite goodness of my Saviour Jesus Christ."
"God give you perseverance, my daughter," said the prelate; he rose, turned to the altar, genuflected, and with uncovered head began the chant "Veni Creator," taken up by the voices of the nuns behind the light screen of iron.
Then he replaced his mitre, and prayed, while the chanted psalms rose under the arches. The novice, who in the meantime had been reconducted to her place at the prie-Dieu, rose, genuflected to the altar, and then knelt between her two bridesmaids before the abbot of La Trappe, who had reseated himself.
Her two companions lifted the veil of the bride, took off her wreath of orange flowers, unrolled the coils of her hair, while a priest spread a napkin on the knees of the prelate, and the deacon presented a pair of long scissors on a salver.
Then before the gesture of this monk, making himself ready, like an executioner, to shear the condemned person, whose hour of expiation was at hand, the terrible beauty of innocence becoming like crime, in substitution for sins of which she was ignorant, which she could not even understand, was evident to the public who had come to the chapel out of curiosity, and in consternation at the superhuman denial of justice, it trembled when the bishop seized the entire handful of her hair, and drew it towards him over her brow.
Then there was as it were a flash of steel in a dark shower.
In the death-like silence of the church the grinding of the scissors was heard in the mass of hair which fell under the blades, and then all was silent. Dom Etienne opened his hand, and the rain fell on his knees in long black threads.
There was a sigh of relief when the priests and bridesmaids led away the bride, looking strange in her train, with her head discrowned and her neck bare.