At the start of 20th century, two Edwardian ladies caused a publishing sensation with an account of meeting the ghost of Marie Antoinette at Versailles. Tim Richardson revisits the tale.
Eerie effects: weather, light and an indefinable 'sense of place’ can lend a garden a
spooky atmosphere Photo: ANDREA JONES
6:30AM GMT 21 Dec 2012/ The Telegraph
Ghosts in broad daylight, a curious dreamlike experience, jolts of disorientation followed by the growing recognition that something strange has happened… for anyone interested in gardens and their particular atmospheres, The Trianon Adventure, a “true” Edwardian ghost story, retains a curious resonance. The book (also known as An Adventure), became a bestseller upon publication in 1911 and remained a talking point throughout the first half of the 20th century. Today the story is almost forgotten.
The “adventure” in question happened on a hot day in August 1901, when two academic ladies, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, paid a visit to Versailles and the jardin anglais of the Petit Trianon – Marie Antoinette’s celebrated hideaway half a mile to the north of the main palace. This is an informal landscape of mazy paths, meandering streams, dark glades and small, evocative buildings, such as the Temple of Love (a neoclassical rotunda), the Belvedere (an exquisite octagonal pavilion) and the Rocher, or rock bridge. Secreted in a cleft among the little knolls behind the Belvedere is the queen’s grotto, a delightful feature with entrances on two levels; it was here that the queen was reputed to have been found, deep in thought, when she was first told of the approach of the revolutionary mob. The planting was restored in 2008 using a 1795 botanical inventory, including numerous specimens of what were then North American rarities. But even today, perhaps the chief sensation this garden inspires is disorientation.
The Petit Trianon, Versailles (ALAMY)
Miss Moberly was principal of the fledgling all-female Oxford college, St Hugh’s, and Miss Jourdain was headmistress of a girls’ school in Watford. The two were spending three weeks sightseeing in Paris, partly in order to assess their compatibility as potential colleagues at St Hugh’s.
According to Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain, that afternoon they encountered a succession of people in late-18th-century costume, some of whom spoke to them. At the time, they thought little of it. The first of these spectres was a servant woman shaking a sheet from the window of a building (later found to be non-existent), followed by a pair of ill-mannered “gardeners” in uniform (subsequently identified by the ladies as Swiss Guards), then a repulsive-looking man with a pockmarked face leaning on a balustrade next to a rocky outcrop. He was followed by a handsome, out-of-breath young man in a wide-brimmed hat, who appeared as if from nowhere behind them and told them to go back to the palace immediately. The climax of this ghostly tour was a woman seen sketching (by Miss Moberly only, although in later testimony Miss Jourdain said she could sense a presence), who could only have been Marie Antoinette – that is what the ladies claimed.
One of the many extraordinary features of the story was the ladies’ later insistence that, at the time, neither of them remarked upon the fact that anything unusual was happening. They noticed the strange costumes, they said, but reconciled them to modern life in different ways. It was only several months after the event that they began to suspect that they may have had a paranormal experience, and wrote down their testimonies. It transpired that they did not see exactly the same things at the same time, and a second visit to Versailles by Miss Jourdain revealed that the topography of the place as they remembered it was in fact completely different: certain features had disappeared entirely or been replaced by others; paths had vanished; distances seemed radically foreshortened. In addition, Miss Jourdain had some more ghostly sightings: peasant labourers loading a cart at the Hameau (Marie Antoinette’s model farm, adjacent to the Petit Trianon), a tall man walking through the woods, and the sound of music.
These delays and discrepancies were subsequently to provide ammunition for sceptical observers, but they also lend the story a peculiar piquancy, a frisson of the random unexpectedness and odd detail of real life, that has proved irresistible to many. Reading the ladies’ accounts, one cannot help but be carried along by the story, whether or not one believes it is true. With their book, Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain produced an accidental masterpiece of supernatural fiction.
Anne Moberly (left) and Eleanor Jourdain
An Adventure was not published until 1911, almost a decade after that spectral afternoon at Versailles. The ladies felt compelled to tell their story – albeit under pseudonyms – because of the short shrift they had received from the Society for Psychical Research, to whom they had sent their accounts in 1902. The scepticism of the society infuriated the pair, and they embarked on a concerted, even obsessional, campaign of research in the French national archives and elsewhere. They aimed to identify the characters and buildings they had seen, and did so triumphantly – or so they believed.
In fact, the evidence in the various editions of their book is, to put it kindly, far from conclusive. But the ladies continued to be taken seriously because of their social and academic respectability: no one could quite believe that they had simply made it all up.
So what was the truth? Of course there is a chance that the ladies’ testimonies are completely accurate and they really saw the ghosts, but it seems more likely that between them they embroidered their memory of events, then talked about them publicly, and finally found they had no choice but to justify the stories as they best knew how – through academic research. Once that decision had been taken, there was no going back: their own reputations, and also that of St Hugh’s, were at stake. It is possible that the ghosts may have been real people wearing 18th-century costume, dressed up either for a fête champêtre or for a film, or perhaps as guests at one of the parties which were known to have been held around this time at the Petit Trianon by the dandyish Comte de Montesquieu. But there is no conclusive evidence for any of this.
I am inclined to believe that the ladies invented almost everything on the most slender basis, partly arising from their own readings around the subject, as a manifestation of their excitement and delight at having met each other at all. After their meeting in Paris, Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain remained devoted companions, referred to as “man and wife” by the college servants. Close attachments between women were common among those in charge of these early female educational establishments. Paris was then the epicentre of such sexual emancipation, and Marie Antoinette was something of a cult figure. In the end, The Trianon Adventure is perhaps best understood as a romance rather than a ghost story.
These delays and discrepancies were subsequently to provide ammunition for sceptical observers, but they also lend the story a peculiar piquancy, a frisson of the random unexpectedness and odd detail of real life, that has proved irresistible to many. Reading the ladies’ accounts, one cannot help but be carried along by the story, whether or not one believes it is true. With their book, Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain produced an accidental masterpiece of supernatural fiction.
Anne Moberly (left) and Eleanor Jourdain
An Adventure was not published until 1911, almost a decade after that spectral afternoon at Versailles. The ladies felt compelled to tell their story – albeit under pseudonyms – because of the short shrift they had received from the Society for Psychical Research, to whom they had sent their accounts in 1902. The scepticism of the society infuriated the pair, and they embarked on a concerted, even obsessional, campaign of research in the French national archives and elsewhere. They aimed to identify the characters and buildings they had seen, and did so triumphantly – or so they believed.
In fact, the evidence in the various editions of their book is, to put it kindly, far from conclusive. But the ladies continued to be taken seriously because of their social and academic respectability: no one could quite believe that they had simply made it all up.
So what was the truth? Of course there is a chance that the ladies’ testimonies are completely accurate and they really saw the ghosts, but it seems more likely that between them they embroidered their memory of events, then talked about them publicly, and finally found they had no choice but to justify the stories as they best knew how – through academic research. Once that decision had been taken, there was no going back: their own reputations, and also that of St Hugh’s, were at stake. It is possible that the ghosts may have been real people wearing 18th-century costume, dressed up either for a fête champêtre or for a film, or perhaps as guests at one of the parties which were known to have been held around this time at the Petit Trianon by the dandyish Comte de Montesquieu. But there is no conclusive evidence for any of this.
I am inclined to believe that the ladies invented almost everything on the most slender basis, partly arising from their own readings around the subject, as a manifestation of their excitement and delight at having met each other at all. After their meeting in Paris, Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain remained devoted companions, referred to as “man and wife” by the college servants. Close attachments between women were common among those in charge of these early female educational establishments. Paris was then the epicentre of such sexual emancipation, and Marie Antoinette was something of a cult figure. In the end, The Trianon Adventure is perhaps best understood as a romance rather than a ghost story.
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