LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN

 

Two women traveling in Paris in 1901 saw many sites - The Louvre, the Arc de Triomphe. Surely they ate baguettes, brie, and eclairs and perhaps bought themselves new chapeaux. But they also traveled back in time - okay not exactly, but something similar. They saw an imprint of the past, kind of like how when exposed to bright light you can see an after image. Only this after image lasted longer than a few seconds, and featured other people, including Marie Antoinette.

Let's go back to 1672. King Louis XV built Le Petite Trianon on the grounds of Versailles as a gift for his mistress - a high class shag shack if there ever was one. Louis XVI gave Le Petite Trianon to Marie Antoinette, and she decided to make the grounds of working farm. Gardeners grew vegetables, and servants tended to farm animals. In the Sofia Coppola film Marie Antoinette, the queen and her baby daughter feed a lamb - Marie Antoinette in her Cottage Core era. Marie Antoinette used Le Petite Trianon as her home - just a few feet from Versailles - away from home.

In 1901 Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, two school administrators from London journey to Paris on holiday. As they walked around Versailles with a tour group the two decided to exit the palace and explore the grounds. The entrance to Le Petite Trianon was closed, so the two entered through an alley. Later they would say they felt an oppressive dreariness. They asked two gardeners for directions to the main building. The gardeners seemed perturbed by the two ladies but pointed the way. The two walked on a few feet, then were met with a pockmarked man they felt as "odious" and "repulsive." They walked on until Moberly saw a woman ahead, sketch pad in hand. Moberly would describe the woman as wearing a light summer dress and a white hat, fair-haired and pretty, but sadness radiated from her. Moberly and Jourdain walked back to the main grounds of Versailles and felt an atmospheric shift, lightness returning to the air around them.

A week later Moberly and Jourdain tried to logic out what happened. They agreed to write separate accounts of what they each saw. The accounts overlapped somewhat - the perturbed gardener and the mean man - but only Moberly saw the woman ; Jourdain said she did not see her. They both remarked the gardener's clothes were a distinct shade of green, but seemed old-fashioned. After some research into Le Petite Trianon they found the gardeners in the late 1700s wore green uniforms similar to those they'd seen. The odious man was Le Compte de Vaudreil, an advisor to the palace. He had suffered a disease as a child and was left scarred.

The ladies toured Versailles on August 10, 1901. In 1792 on that day Le Compte de Vaudreil informed Marie Antoinette the king's Swiss guards had been slaughtered by an angry mob of revolutionaries. This was the beginning of Marie Antoinette's eventual imprisonment and execution. Moberly and Jourdain realized that Marie Antoinette was the woman sketching and what was to be Marie Antoinette's the last carefree day of her life. Moberly and Jourdain realized they need to tell the world about their time slip.

10 years later, in 1911 they published a book titled "An Adventure," under the pseudonyms Elizabeth Morison and Francis La Mont. The book was a smash success. Moberly and Jourdain pointed out they thoroughly researched the era, Marie Antoinette, and her associates. They traveled to Le Petite Trianon many times to try to recreate the experience, but could not retrace their exact path. Every time they revisited things were modern and exactly the way they should be. They argued 20 points of coincidence in their shared experience. Moberly and Jourdain both came from religious families and respected faculty at Oxford.

Skeptics decried there were many inconsistencies in their joint reports. One critic pointed out that a gay man (a poet) who lived near Versaille threw theme parties regularly, so the two ladies could have stumbled upon a very detailed, very elaborate drag show. But no events were booked at Versailles or Le Petite Trianon for that date. Some critics called their recollections a lesbian folie a deux - a shared delusion caused by the stress of being a closeted lesbian couple. Other critics said they were just old ladies who wandered around, got lost, and muddled their recollections due to heat and the strain of being lost. The ladies quietly lived the rest of their lives. Their identities were made public in 1931. Since then their "Adventure" has been mostly forgotten, but was made into a BBC TV movie called Miss Morison's Ghosts. No one will ever know if Moberly and Jourdain truly saw what they reported. When in Paris keep your eye out for bargain baguettes - and the ghost of Marie Antoinette.

SOURCES :

Moberly-Jourdain Incident, The. Wikipedia. 

FURTHER MEDIA:

Flowers, Ashley, host. "HAUNTED : The Moberly-Jourdain Incident." Supernatural, Parcast, 30 September 2021. 

Lambert, Katie / Keener, Candace, hosts. "Ghosts of History : Versailles." Stuff You Missed In History Class, iheartradio, 24 June 2009.