In 1901 two highly respectable academic women – the first principal of St Hugh’s College, Oxford and her deputy – met Marie Antoinette in the gardens of Versailles. That’s quite a challenging thought considering the Queen of France had actually been executed over 100 years earlier.
S0 how did it happen? Here’s the beginning of the story in the words of one of them
“After some days of sight-seeing in Paris, to which we were almost strangers, on an August afternoon, 1901, Miss Lamont and I went to Versailles. We had very hazy ideas as to where it was or what there was to be seen. Both of us thought it might prove to be a dull expedition. We went by train, and walked through the rooms and galleries of the Palace with interest…We sat down in the Salle des Glaces, where a very sweet air was blowing in at the open windows over the flower-beds below, and finding that there was time to spare, I suggested our going to the Petit Trianon. My sole knowledge of it was from a magazine article read as a girl, from which I received a general impression that it was a farm-house where the Queen had amused herself.”
“It was a most enjoyable walk” until….
being armed with a tiny and inaccurate map, having not asked directions and there being no signposts, the ladies set off down a shady lane and got lost.
The Chatelet & Mique images in this post come from the 1781 Souvenir Album of the Petit Trianon, in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The blurry photographic clips which I’ve included come from Miss Morison’s Ghost’s a 1981 TV film starring Dame Wendy Hiller and Hannah Gordon, which can be found on YouTube but nowhere else as far as I can see. Their lack of sharpness somehow captures the rather spooky nature of the story.
Miss Lamont then began to feel as if “something were wrong.” There were deserted buildings and soon there were unusual looking people too, including some who looked like figures “in a tableau vivant”. They asked directions from a pair of men they assumed were gardeners because they had a wheelbarrow and spades, but who perhaps were “really very dignified officials, dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats.”
Later they came to a wood within which was “a light garden kiosk, circular, and like a small bandstand, by which a man was sitting. The place was so shut in that we could not see beyond it. Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry . There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.”
The two women felt “a moment of genuine alarm” when “the man… turned his head and looked at us. .. [his] face was most repulsive—its expression odious. His complexion was very dark and rough.”
They both felt a sense of relief when a “red-faced” gentleman “tall, with large dark eyes, wearing “buckled shoes” that “made him look like an old picture” suddenly rushed up behind them, warned them away from the kiosk and gave them directions in oddly accented French, before running off again. Heading towards the Petit Trianon the two women “passed over the small rustic bridge which crossed a tiny ravine.” The path then led under trees, skirting “a narrow meadow of long grass …very much overshadowed by trees” which “gave the whole place a sombre look suggestive of dampness, and shut out the view of the house until we were close to it”.
A rustic bridge in the grounds of the Petit Trianon, by Eugene Adget, c1902-20
The Petit Trianon itself was “a square, solidly built small country house” with shuttered windows. “There was a terrace… and on the rough grass… a lady was sitting, holding out a paper as though to look at it at arm’s-length. I supposed her to be sketching.” She saw us, and turned and looked full at us… She had on a shady white hat perched on a good deal of fair hair that fluffed round her forehead. Her light summer dress was arranged on her shoulders in handkerchief fashion, and there was a little line of either green or gold near the edge… I thought she was a tourist, but that her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual (though people were wearing fichu bodices that summer). I looked straight at her; but some indescribable feeling made me turn away annoyed at her being there.”
Moving past and seeing an unshuttered window on the Petit Trianon the two women went to peer in, although “I was beginning to feel as though we were walking in a dream, the stillness and oppressiveness were so unnatural.” But as they neared it a footman appeared from a side building, slamming the door behind him and, with a “peculiar smile”, conducted them round to the official entrance. There they tagged onto a tour but “too far off from the guide to hear much of his story.” Even so “we were very much interested, and felt quite lively again.”
They returned to Paris that evening but surprisingly “we were neither of us inclined to talk, and did not mention any of the events of the afternoon.” When they eventually did Miss Morison said she had felt a “sensation of dreamy unnatural oppression” and asked Miss Lamont if she thought the Petit Trianon is haunted? Her answer was prompt: “Yes, I do.”
A few weeks later Miss Morison mentioned “the sketching lady” they had seen, only to be told to her amazement that Miss Lamont hadn’t seen anyone. “I exclaimed that it was impossible that she should not have seen the individual; for we were walking side by side and went straight up to her, passed her and looked down upon her from the terrace.” This gave a new twist to what they were already considering a mystery, so each agreed to write up their own account of what had happened that afternoon. These were broadly similar although each noticed things the other hadn’t and they found these discrepancies intriguing, but had no time to investigate further.
It was only when Miss Lamont, who taught French, was preparing a lecture on the French Revolution that she realised that the date of their visit, the 10th August, was the anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries Palace in Paris by the revolutionary mob in 1792. Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette had watched the massacre of their household guards and had themselves been seized and imprisoned.
Now Miss Lamont began to think more deeply about her experiences that day and talked to a French friend who ” remembered hearing from friends at Versailles that on a certain day in August Marie Antoinette is regularly seen sitting outside the garden front at the Petit Trianon ” and that the gardens “are peopled with those who used to be with her there… for a day and a night”. Miss Lamont then recounted her adventure at the Petit Trianon “and when I quoted the words that the man spoke to us, and imitated as well as I could his accent, she immediately said that it was the Austrian pronunciation of French.”
The two women now began to ask themselves if they “had inadvertently entered within an act of the Queen’s memory …and had been been trapped in the downcast mind of Marie Antoinette.” Did this explain “our curious sensation of being completely shut in and oppressed.”
As one recent commentator put it “It was time travel with a hairpin twist; they’d landed in the psyche of a woman in 1792 who was thinking about 1789.”
They began to do more research, finding a portrait of Marie Antoinette by Wertmuller which resembled the “sketching lady” Miss Morison had seen.
The. ladies sketch map published in 1913
But book reading wasn’t enough. So a few months later in January 1902, Miss Lamont returned to Versailles. Her intention was to “to make a plan of the paths and the buildings; for the guide-books spoke of the Temple de l’Amour and the Belvedere, and I thought one of them might prove to be our kiosk.”
Once there she found herself confused because not only could she not retrace their steps, but the gardens around the Trianon seemed very different. While she found the temple it was not the building they had passed in the summer, although at least there was “none of the eerie feeling we had experienced”. Nor could she find, the strange kiosk, or “the bridge with the stream under it.”
The eerie sensation returned when she decided to visit the dairy in the Hameau, Marie Antoinette’s “play village”. There she noticed a cart being filled with sticks by two labourers, wearing “tunics and capes with pointed hoods of bright colours, a sort of terracotta red and deep blue.” But when she turned back after to look briefly at the Hameau “men and cart were completely out of sight…I could not see any trace of them on the ground” despite her being able to see a long way in every direction. “Their total disappearance in so short a time seemed unaccountable. This made her uncomfortable but she still made her way to the queen’s dairy only to find it closed and shuttered .
While she was puzzling about that, more strange figures appeared: “a man, cloaked like those we had seen before, slipped swiftly through the line of trees His movement attracted my attention because it was remarkable. He seemed to be among the trees, and yet the straightness of his course suggested that they were independent of one another.”Next she “heard a rustling behind which made me wonder why people in silk dresses came out on such a wet day; and I said to myself, ‘just like French people’. I turned sharply round to see who they were, but saw no one, and then all in a moment I had the same feeling as by the terrace in the summer, only in a much greater degree; it was as though I were closed in by a group of people who already filled the path, coming from behind and passing me. At one moment there seemed really no room for me. I heard some women’s voices talking French, and caught the words ‘Monsieur et Madame’ said close to my ear. The crowd got scarce and drifted away, and then faint music, as of a band not far off, was audible. It was playing very light music with a good deal of repetition in it. Both voices and music were diminished in tone, as in a phonograph, unnaturally.” She wrote down twelve bars of this music from memory afterwards and in 1907 showed them to an unnamed “musical expert” who said they dated from “about 1780.” You can hear it here
Miss Lamont now beat a hasty retreat and once back in the town of Versailles she made “careful enquiries as to whether the band have been playing that day but was told… it had not.” She also discovered that “there was a tradition of Marie Antoinette having been seen making butter within the dairy and for that reason it was shuttered.” More significantly she learned that on 5th October 1789 Marie Antoinette had been sitting in the garden when a page ran to tell her the Paris mob was heading for Versailles and were probably only an hour away. This, she felt, explained the “red-faced man” running past in such a hurry near the kiosk: he was the messenger looking for the queen. That also accounted for the feeling of depression they felt: they really had walked “into” Marie Antoinette’s memory.
Armed with this information and their theories the ladies approached the Society for Psychical Research which had been set up in 1882 to investigate “mesmeric, psychical and ‘spiritualist’ phenomena in a purely scientific spirit” . However, the Society dismissed their account as lacking credibility so they resolved to gather yet more evidence to prove their case.
The Queen’s Grotto Chatelet & Mique 1781
The women searched the archives and every book they could lay their hands on and interviewed anyone they thought might have useful information. Amongst much else they discovered that Marie Antoinette’s bodyguards uniform were the grayish-green colour they remembered “the gardeners” wearing; that her dressmaker had made her a green silk bodice and semi-transparent white fichu which matched the “sketching lady’s” dress; the door they heard slamming was to the Trianon chapel and were told it hadn’t been unlocked for at least a century; that children they’d seen were the same age and gender of the children of the queen’s gardener. They even tracked down obscure details about 18thc shoe buckles, how leaves and sticks were cleared, the history of an antiquated plough they’d seen, and all sorts of garden-related minutiae. All this is summed up in the central section of their book: An Adventure which they published in 1911.
The second edition of An Adventure in 1913 came complete with a timeline, appendices, copious footnotes, and even several archival maps, intended to prove that their route through the gardens followed the Trianon’s 1789 layout. In it they felt forced to conclude that they had travelled backwards in time, entering telepathically into “an act of memory” performed by Marie Antoinette herself during her incarceration following the sacking of the Tuileries. As senior academics they were clearly worried about the effect their involvement in the psychic world might have on their reputation so they chose to publish under the pseudonyms I have used in my account.
Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937)
by Sir William Llewellyn, 1899
In fact they were Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain. Annie’s father was the bishop of Salisbury,and she had been principal of St. Hugh’s, since its foundation in 1886. Eleanor was headmistress of a girls’ school in Watford but had been recommended for the vacant post of vice-principal at St. Hugh’s. Moberly agreed to meet with her in Paris where Jourdain was staying to see if the two of them could work together compatibly. They could and they did for the next 23 years until Eleanor Jourdain’s death in 1924.
Eleanor Jourdain (1863-1924)
by Raymond Levi-Strauss
An Adventure was very popular; 11,000 copies sold in the first two years, They expanded their “proof” in the second edition and it went through five more editions, the last in 1955 after which the copyright holder refused to allow further editions. The different earlier editions vary considerably and two more elaborated versions have been published since the book came out of copyright.
The Moberly-Jourdain incident as it has become known attracted almost ceaseless attention from the day of publication. Articles and books have poured off the press discussing the veracity of the two women, examining every aspect of the story and their archive which is in the Bodleian.
So did they meet the ghost of Marie Antoinette and her friends, staff and visitors? Who knows? What’s interesting that virtually no-one has called them hoaxers or has suggested they were lying, but rather that maybe they were just a couple of “eccentric spinsters, harmlessly caught up in a sentimental flight of fancy”. It’s worth noting that both women claimed other paranormal experiences so was their walk an hallucinatory experience: a shared delusion or a folie à deux? . In 2016 researchers tried to recreate the journey through the garden but found it impossible to reconcile their account with the reality on the ground.
Another theory was that they had simply stumbled into a fancy dress party given by decadent French aristocrat and poet Robert de Montesquiou who lived nearby, and the music was from a band playing outside the gardens. Most commentators, however tend to opt for a much less supernatural, more everyday explanation, It was a hot day, the women were tired and combined that led to their sense of an oppressive atmosphere, especially as they got lost. The result was that, in retrospect, they had simply mistakenly identified ordinary people and objects from 1901 with those of 1792.
Whatever the answer, it’s a fascinating saga even though we’ll never know whether it really was Marie Antoinette sketching outside the Petit Trianon that August day in 1901. What do you think?
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