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| The Gardens at Petit Trianon |
“On
a hot summer’s afternoon in August of 1901, two respectable English
schoolteachers, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, decided to visit Versailles
on a sight-seeing expedition. They had never been there before. After looking
in on the Palace of Versailles, they started to walk toward the Petit Trianon.
“Suddenly,
without realizing it, they walked backward in time. They crossed a garden that
did not exist in 1901 but which had existed in 1789. They saw and spoke to
people who had been dead for more than a century. Their incredible psychic
adventure, fully supported by years of research, created a sensation when it
was announced in 1911.
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| Le Petit Trianon |
“Annie
Moberly, age 55, and Eleanor Jourdain, age 38, with a guidebook in hand... took
a stroll through the gardens. Their destination was the Petit Trianon, a small
private chateau at the far end of the grounds, which...” Marie Antoinette used
to escape court life.
“Trying
to find the Petit Trianon, Moberly and Jourdain missed a right turn, kept going
straight ahead, began wandering aimlessly—and thus, as they would later claim,
they took leave of the 20th century and reentered 18th
century.
“From
what they reconstructed afterward, here is what they saw and here is what they
encountered:
“Moberly,
alone, saw a woman shaking a white cloth out of the window of a building.
Jourdain, alone, saw some old fashioned farm implements including a plow, lying
on the grass. They both viewed two men wearing what appeared to be masquerade
costumes—small tricorn hats and long grayish-green coats—and thought them to be
gardeners. They asked these men the way to the Petit Trianon, and one man
answered mechanically that they must continue ahead. Then, off to the right,
Jourdain, alone, saw a cottage, with a woman passing a jug to a young girl
standing in the open doorway.
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| Garden Kiosk as seen today |
“Jourdain
remembered later how she felt as they had plodded onward. ‘I began to feel as
though I were walking in my sleep; the heavy dreaminess was oppressive.’
Finally, they reached the edge of a wood, where they could see a man seated
near the steps of a garden kiosk, its columns topped by a round roof. Moberly
also recalled her reactions: ‘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 ladies had a closer glimpse of the man near the steps, and they were frightened. He was swarthy, pockmarked, and he wore a large hat and heavy black cloak.
‘The man’s face was most repulsive—its expression odious,’ Moberly
recalled. About to hasten away, the two women saw a younger man who apparently
had come from behind some rocks that were in the path. He was handsome, his
hairstyle resembling ‘an old picture’, and his face was flushed. He spoke to
them eagerly in oddly accented French, trying to divert them from the path they
had taken. They finally understood that he was giving them directions to the Petit
Trianon.
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| Marie Antoinette with her 2nd son in garden |
“Following
the young man’s directions, Moberly and Jourdain took another path to their
right, crossed an attractive rustic bridge spanning a tiny ravine, skirted a
narrow meadow, and at last came upon the Petit Trianon. On the lawn before the
Trianon they stopped, and Annie Moberly watched an aristocratic lady—wearing a
large white hat, and an old fashioned long-waisted green bodice above a full
short skirt**—sitting and sketching the scenery. She was rather pretty, although
not young, and she stared at Moberly. Then a uniformed official emerged from
the Petit Trianon to escort the English ladies through the chateau before
sending them away.
“Annie
Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain left the palace grounds and took a carriage to the
Hôtel des Réservoirs in Versailles to have tea before returning to Miss
Jourdain’s apartment in Paris. Neither of them mentioned to the other [what
they saw] at their visit to Versailles, at least not until a week later when
Miss Moberly was recording impressions of her visit to France. As Miss Moberly
came to the afternoon at Versailles, she began to feel a strange, dreamy,
unnatural oppression. She stopped writing and turned to Miss Jourdain and
asked, ‘Do you think that the Petit Trianon is haunted?’ Miss Jourdain nodded
firmly. ‘Yes, I do.’ And for the 1st time, each woman told the other
how eerie an experience it had been for her.
“Three
months later, when Annie Moberly was back in Oxford, Miss Jourdain came from
Paris to be her house guest. Obsessively, they resumed their discussion of that
afternoon at Versailles—and how it became apparent that while they had both
seen certain things, each of them had seen something the other had not seen—or
had been unable to see.
Jourdain, alone, had seen the plow on the grass and the
woman and girl in the cottage doorway. Moberly, alone, had seen the aristocratic
lady sketching before the Petit Trianon. In those moments, both women perceived
that something unusual, indeed something very unusual, had happened to them at
Versailles—they had, inexplicably, stumbled backward through time into another
age. They vowed to keep their experience secret, while each wrote up a separate
and detailed account of the adventure and both agreed to do thorough research
on the history of Versailles and the Petit Trianon.
“For
9 years, Moberly and Jourdain did their detective work—digging into every
archive available that had information on the background of Versailles. The two
ladies visited Versailles again and again. When they had completed their sleuthing, they had learned that their
afternoon in Versailles in 1901 had actually been in the afternoon in 1789....
The two ‘gardeners’ in greenish coats the women had met were actually two
Swiss Guardsmen on duty that day. The girl in the cottage doorway was named
Marion and she had lived with her mother on the palace grounds. The repulsive
man in the black cloak seated near the kiosk steps was the Comte de Vaudreuil,
a Creole friend of the Queen of France. And, the most exciting of all for
Moberly and Jourdain, they discovered—from a portrait done by Wertmuller, and
from the journal of Madame Eloffe, the Queen’s dressmaker (who had made her
mistress two green bodices and several short white skirts** for that summer of
1789)—that they had come upon Queen Marie Antoinette herself as she sat
sketching before her chateau.
“The
only sight Moberly and Jourdain did not identify was the rustic bridge spanning
the ravine that they had to cross to reach the Trianon. The earliest map they
could find—one copied in 1783 from the original plan for Marie Antoinette’s
garden (which had been drawn by her architect but had subsequently been
lost)—had not shown the rustic bridge or ravine. But no matter. Moberly and
Jourdain were satisfied. They already had enough.
“In
1911, Moberly and Jourdain published their findings pseudonymously in a little
book entitled An Adventure.*** The book
itself was a sensation, although critics did not take it seriously. Worst of
all, the London Society for the Psychical Research, which collected facts on
psychic experiences and had such prestigious members as Henri Bergson, John
Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, Lord Tennyson, rejected the adventure of the
schoolteachers and announced that the experience was built on ‘the weakness of
human memory’.
“Defensively,
Moberly and Jourdain began to reveal to friends, to faculty members, to their
pupils, that they were the ones who had the adventure at Versailles. The
families of their students were appalled. Faculty members were skeptical, and
conflict grew. And generally, throughout England and France, the two
schoolteachers were ridiculed by the majority of scholars, historians, and
experts in psychic phenomena. The two women were regarded as romancers or
hysterics—and the things they claimed to have seen were regarded as no more
authentic than the rustic bridge and the ravine that they had been unable to
prove had ever existed at Versailles.
“But
in the end, Moberly and Jourdain scored a stunning triumph. True—in 1901 there
was no rustic bridge and no ravine, even though the women swore they had
crossed such a bridge. True—De la Motte’s map of the gardens, done in 1783,
showed neither the bridge nor the ravine. But suddenly, one day in 1912,
Moberly and Jourdain learned that the long lost original map of the gardens
drawn by Marie Antoinette’s architect Mique had been found—had been discovered,
charred and crumpled, stuffed inside an old chimney in a house at Montmorency.
And Mique’s original map was legible—and lo, it showed the ravine and the
rustic bridge over it, which De la Motte had sloppily failed to copy down.
Moberly and Jourdain were vindicated—and they published news of the great find
in a 3rd edition [unavailable in google books] which, for the 1st time, bore their real
names as the authors, for they were no longer ashamed but now were proud of
their book.
“How
many other human beings had ever—since man has existed on earth—made such a journey
as this one, backward through the time barrier into the distant past—and had
returned with word of it?
“Miss
Jourdain died in 1924 at the age of 61. Miss Moberly died in 1937 at the age of
91.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
** Skirts in 1901 were much longer than the styles in 1789 which were approx. ankle length.
*** The actual book An Adventure can be found [free download] in google books. My copy is dated 1913.
~~~~~~
Many thanks to:
Fully quoted from: The People’s Almanac by David
Wallechinsky & Irving Wallace, Doubleday & Co., Inc., Garden City, NY,
1975.
Wikicommons, Public Domain  |
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