August 10 — 122nd anniversary of a jaunt around the gardens of Versailles by two Respectable English Ladies, who either experienced a joint hallucination, or travelled through time and saw Marie Antoinette.
Miss Morison and Miss Lamont had been round the palace of Versailles on this day in 1901, but it “left them unimpressed”, so they headed off to find Marie Antoinette’s retreat from the court, the Petit Trianon — which doesn’t look especially petit.
They were actually called Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, incidentally. Miss Morison and Miss Lamont were pseudonyms they used when they published a book about what happened. We’ll get to that later. Anyway…
They didn’t know where the Petit Trianon was, and in an age before foldout maps at tourist attractions, just set optimistically out for it. They passed “a deserted farmhouse”, noticed “a peculiar-looking old plough and began to feel … as if ‘something were wrong’”.
Then, “Turning down a lane, they espied two men dressed in ‘long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats’,” then a woman and a girl dressed unusually. “The woman handed the girl a jug, and for a moment they seemed to pause, like figures ‘in a tableau vivant’.”
They came across a “repulsive”-looking man sitting near “something resembling a garden kiosk”. He was “dark and rough”, with an “evil and yet unseeing” expression, his face possibly “pitted by smallpox”. They had sensations of “heavy dreaminess”.
Basically, it was all dead weird, and “Both were relieved when a ‘red-faced’ man wearing ‘buckled shoes’ suddenly rushed up behind them, warned them (in oddly accented French) that they were going the wrong way, and then ran off in another direction”.
They followed him and finally found the Petit Trianon — and
a fair-haired woman sitting on a stool with her back to the house, apparently sketching. The woman wore a large white summer hat and a curiously old-fashioned dress
Being terribly English, they naturally didn’t speak to each other about their misgivings for a full week, until Moberly wrote to her sister about it, and “the same sensation of dreamy unnatural oppression came over me” so she asked Jourdain:
They returned to England and to their jobs — principal (Moberly) and newly appointed vice-principal (Jourdain) of St Hugh’s College, Oxford — and discussed what they’d seen, only to discover discrepancies. Jourdain hadn’t see Marie Antoinette, for one thing…
Besides the sketching lady, Miss Moberly had seen a woman shaking a cloth out of a window-Miss Jourdain had seen neither. Moberly in turn had not seen Jourdain’s “woman and girl with a jug,” even though, according to Jourdain, they had walked right past them. But this was not all: Jourdain had also discovered two startling pieces of information. While turning over a set of school lessons on the French Revolution, she had suddenly realized that the day on which they had visited the Trianon, 10 August, was the anniversary of the sacking of the Tuileries. On that day in 1792, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had witnessed the massacre of their Swiss Guards and been imprisoned in the Hall of the Assembly.
A friend told them Marie Antoinette was ‘known’ to haunt the Trianon “on a certain day in August”, wearing the outfit Moberly had seen. Had they “inadvertently entered within an act of the Queen’s memory”, explaining “our curious sensation of being … shut in and oppressed?”
Jourdain went back to Versailles and tried to retrace their steps, but the grounds “seemed mysteriously altered”. They wrote to the Society for Psychical Research, who dismissed their short accounts as “unworthy of investigation”, so…
Being academics, they were thorough. A cottage they’d seen wasn’t there, but had been on a 1783 map. The ‘kiosk’ was also on an 18th century plan, but not there in 1901. The plough was of an old type no longer used anywhere in France.
They also identified the people. The woman and girl were the family of an undergardener. The men in green coats were Swiss guards. A portrait of Marie Antoinette chimed with what they saw, and was believed to be one of the most accurate portrayals of her — and there was a record of her outfit. The repulsive man was the ‘wicked’ Comte de Vaudreil.
So, obviously, when the book came out, everybody took the piss. Mrs Henry Sidgwick, wife of the Society of Psychical Research’s president said they “at best do not seem to be very good at topography”, and had just got lost and misidentified things that were there.
W F Barrett, FRS, wrote of the women’s “lively imagination stimulated by expectancy”, said their work lacked “any real evidential value”, and compared them to two mediums of the time — one claimed to be in touch with Marie Antoinette’s spirit, the other to be her reincarnation.
So, they were right to use those pseudonyms. This is, as you might have gathered by now, a tale of women not being taken seriously — over and above any natural scepticism we should have about tales of the beyond.
As Professor Terry Castle at Stanford puts it,
the spectacle of two eminent women speaking, uncannily, ‘as one’ … must have seemed unusually disturbing … In a society in which masculine prestige was under assault.
After they died, a 1938 book called them eccentric spinsters caught up in a “pathetic illusion”. In 1957, Ghosts of Versailles said they had lived as “husband and wife” and implied that a ghost story was what one would expect of such an “unhealthy” relationship.
Yes: thank heavens we live now in happier, more enlightened times.
They were defended by art historian (and Jourdain’s literary executor) Joan Evans. She said a rich aesthete, Robert de Montesquiou, had lived in a house at Versailles and held fancy dress parties at the time the ladies visited
Moberly and Jourdain had inadvertently wandered into a “rehearsal” for a kind of homosexual garden fete, she maintained, in which Montesquiou, his young lover Gabriel Yturri (formerly “a salesman in a smart tie shop”) and various male friends were “trying out” their costumes. The two men in “greenish coats” were probably Montesquiou and Yturri; the others were probably members of the Montesquiou clique. The “sketching lady” was most likely a transvestite: “the well-bred Miss Moberly,” Evans noted, had thought “she showed ‘a good deal of leg.”’
That (like a fair bit of the above) is from Terry Castle’s paper, and she doesn’t sound convinced, but points out that other explanations — it was a ‘folie à deux’, or “two repressed female homosexuals express[ing] their relationship” — don’t really cut it, either.
Basically, we don’t know what happened, and never will, but it’s such an intriguing story, it once became a TV movie starring Hannah Gordon and the wonderful Wendy Hiller.
The writer Jon Dear says it’s “as much about women trying to be taken seriously in Edwardian Britain as it is about trying to convince the world they’ve been doing the time warp”.
But if you don’t fancy either of those links, you could shell out 30-odd quid for a second hand copy of The Hamlyn Book of Ghosts in Fact and Fiction — or read it on the Internet Archive.
I don’t think Miss Morison and Miss Lamont would approve, mind you.
