A supernatural journey through time by two Edwardian headmistresses
Two women named Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain paid a visit to the Palace of Versailles in France in 1901. While they were looking around the palace grounds, they became lost and seemed to walk backwards through time.
Miss Moberly, born in 1846 (the tenth of fifteen children) was the daughter of the headmaster of Winchester College (who was also Bishop of Salisbury). When she grew up she became the head of a hall of residence for young women, St Hugh’s College, in Oxford. Miss Jourdain was asked to take on the role of her assistant.
Miss Jourdain, born in 1863, was the child of a reverend who was the vicar of Ashbourne in Derbyshire. The eldest of ten siblings, she was the sister to art historian Margaret Jourdain and the mathematician Philip Jourdain. She attended school in Manchester, despite most girls being educated at home during that era. Miss Jourdain also ran a school of her own in Watford and had written several textbooks.
Eleanor Jourdain had an apartment in Paris which she used to teach children English. Before she took on the role of vice-headmistress at Charlotte Moberly’s college, the two women decided to spend some time in the apartment in Paris to get better acquainted, though the main reason may have been because Charlotte wanted to visit the great International Exhibition.
They took a train to the Palace of Versailles in August 1901 and took a tour of the building. While walking in the gardens they missed the turning for the main avenue and wandered onto a lane that passed by the Petit Trianon (a small chateau they were trying to get to). Then strange things started to happen, almost imperceptibly at first.
An Incident in Time
It was August the 10th, 1901. After the palace tour, Misses Moberly and Jourdain decided to walk through the gardens to the Petit Trianon, a Neoclassical style chateau within the gardens of the Grande Trianon. The smaller chateau was built on the orders of Louis XV for his mistress, Madame de Pompadour.
When Louis XVI gained the throne aged 20, he gave the chateau and its surrounding grounds exclusively to his wife, Marie Antoinette.
The two headmistresses looked forward to seeing the gardens’ decorative bridges, waterfalls, pavilions, groves, and the “toy village” where Marie Antoinette would entertain herself pretending to be a peasant woman, a shepherd or a milkmaid in the farm cottages.
They reached the head of a long lake and turned right, through a woodland glade, until they found another stretch of water with the Grande Trianon reflected in it. They passed the body of water on the left and came to a wide green drive, completely empty of people. If they had followed it, they wouldn’t have gotten lost, but they crossed it into a lane instead.
Eleanor was slightly further ahead when Charlotte noticed a woman shaking a white cloth out of the window of a cottage on the corner of the lane. Later, she learned that Eleanor didn’t see the woman.
At that point, both the women weren’t aware of anything unusual going on. They talked about Oxford and mutual friends, moving up the lane and turning right past some buildings.
They came to a fork of three grass-covered paths and chose the central one, as there were two men up ahead from whom they proposed to ask for directions. Both women assumed the men were gardeners because there was a wheelbarrow and a pointed spade nearby, but both men were dressed a little oddly in long, grey-green coats and small, tricornered hats. The men directed Eleanor and Charlotte to keep going straight ahead, then resumed their deep conversation.
Eleanor then saw a detached cottage with a woman and a girl standing in its doorway. They were dressed oddly, too, with white kerchiefs tucked into bodices, and the woman was passing a jug to the girl, who wore an ankle-length skirt and a close-fitting, white cap. Charlotte didn’t see the girl or the woman with the jug.
It was at that point that both Charlotte and Eleanor began to get a creeping sense of surreality, but as they hadn’t known one another all that long, neither dared mention these feelings out loud.
Charlotte Moberly wrote later that “an extraordinary depression came over me, which in spite of every effort to shake it off, steadily deepened until it became quite overpowering.” Unknown to her, Eleanor Jourdain wrote that she “began to feel as if I were walking in (her) sleep; the heavy dreaminess was oppressive.”
They came to a grotto with something like a kiosk or small bandstand in it. Seated by it was a man in a heavy, dark cloak, his face shaded by a big hat. He turned his head suddenly and seemed to look at them, revealing a pockmarked face with a dark and menacing expression. Eleanor felt that he was uncanny and fear-inspiring, and both she and Charlotte had a moment of alarm.
The grotto was so enclosed they couldn’t see anything beyond it. Things took on an unnatural aspect, and not a pleasant one! Even the trees behind the bandstand became flat and lifeless, like a wood depicted on a tapestry, with no light or shade, no hint of a breeze, everything weirdly still.
Footsteps ran up the path behind the two women but when they turned around, nobody was there. However, another person had appeared in the grotto – a handsome gentleman with black, curly hair who called to them in some excitement, “Mesdames, mesdames, il ne faut pas passer par la” and waved his arms before saying “Par ici… cherchez la maison,” indicating he wanted them to take the right-hand path, not the left, as that would take them to the house.
Charlotte and Eleanor moved to a small bridge on the right and turned to thank him, but the man had vanished. They heard someone running yet again, but saw nobody actually running.
Over the bridge, they were on higher ground until they came to a meadow looking onto the front of the Petit Trianon. They mounted a set of steps onto the terrace, and Charlotte caught sight of a lady sitting in the grass growing right up to the house, sketching. This solitary artist turned to look at the two women as they passed, and she was dressed in a light summer dress trimmed with a fichu folded across her shoulders, with a shady, straw hat on top of her puffed-out blonde hair. The young woman was pretty, but at the same time, Charlotte Moberly found her somehow unattractive, still feeling as if she was walking in a dream. Eleanor Jourdain didn’t see the sketching woman.
Misses Moberly and Jourdain walked around to the terrace’s west side, seeking an entrance, the oppressive stillness growing ever more intense. A door opened and a young man dashed out, slamming the door behind him, and ran to them, saying they mustn’t stay there. He offered to take the two ladies to the main entrance off the courtyard. He had a cheerful manner with a slightly mocking smile, and though he wasn’t in livery, they got the impression he could be a junior footman.
The man led Charlotte and Eleanor through a formal French garden walled with trees, into the courtyard, where they found the entrance hall.
Reality asserted itself once again – a guide arrived and invited the two women to join a group of tourists. On leaving, Charlotte and Eleanor took a carriage back to Versailles for tea, and everything was natural, the wind blowing once again.
Taking Stock
The visit wasn’t mentioned for a whole week. However, as Charlotte was writing a letter about her time in France, she began to wonder.
“Do you think the Petit Trianon is haunted?” she asked Eleanor.
“Yes, I do,” her new friend conceded without hesitation.
They finally compared notes and discovered that they hadn’t always been seeing the same things at the same time while they were lost in the gardens.
Charlotte and Eleanor wrote a separate account of what each had experienced (without showing it to the other one) and undertook research of the Trianon’s history. They reckoned they may have seen events that took place on August the 10th 1792, six weeks before the French monarchy was abolished, the siege of the Tuileries, and the slaughter of the King’s guards.
Eleanor revisited the palace grounds again by herself in January 1902, and found that things had altered, the route she and Charlotte had walked now being untraceable. The bandstand and the bridge were missing, the place was swarming with (living) people, the gateway onto the wide green drive was derelict, the drive itself smothered by weeds, none of the three paths they’d had to choose from were there, there was no cottage where Eleanor saw the woman handing a jug to a child, no steps leading to the house-front, and the door through which the “footman” had rushed out was invisible because a wall stood in the way of it. Eleanor asked people she knew in Paris whether there were any ghost stories concerning the Petit Trianon.
They told her that Marie Antoinette’s ghost had been seen in the gardens wearing a light summer hat and a pink dress.
Some people in Versailles village said that the ghosts of the entire court appeared on the anniversary of the siege of the Tuileries on August the 10th, 1792 – the day that led to Marie Antoinette dying via the guillotine.
Through more research, the two women decided that the pockmark-faced man they had seen was the Comte de Vaudreuil, who was a friend of Marie Antoinette’s.
Eventually, Charlotte and Eleanor published a book about their experience titled “An Adventure” in 1911, under the pen-names Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont. The book, along with its claim that Marie Antoinette had appeared in the palace gardens in 1901, caused quite a ruckus and a lot of divided opinions.
The true identities of the book’s authors weren’t revealed until 1931.
Can It Be Explained?
It may have been that the two headmistresses had stumbled into an eccentric sort of LARPing party and not realised.
According to Philippe Jullian in 1965, the French poet Robert de Montesquiou lived near the palace of Versailles at the time of the “incident” and he was sometimes prone to holding parties where he and his friends dressed in historical clothing and performed “tableau vivants” as entertainment.
However, Charlotte and Eleanor claimed to have had other psychic experiences before and after the Versailles time-travelling escapade, including Charlotte Moberly reportedly seeing the Roman Emperor Constantine in the Louvre in 1914, an unusually tall man in a gold crown and a toga.
In the First World War, Eleanor Jourdain grew convinced there was a German spy hiding in her college. Eleanor developed more and more authoritarian behaviour and suddenly died in 1924, in the middle of a scandal over her management of the college. Charlotte Moberly died in 1937.
Once their book came out of copyright, it was republished in 1988 titled “The Ghosts of Trianon: The Complete ‘An Adventure’” by Thoth Publication. In 2008 it was released by CreateSpace.
So, what do you reckon happened at Versailles? Are there any other instances of walking through time you’d recommend I look into next? Let me know in the comments!
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moberly%E2%80%93Jourdain_incident
The World’s Greatest Psychics & Mystics by Margaret Nicholas
Nightwalks 