What happened
On 10 August 1901 Charlotte Anne Moberly, principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, and her future successor Eleanor Jourdain were touring Versailles and looking for the way to the Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette's favorite retreat. Both felt a strange depression, and the landscape seemed unnaturally flat and lifeless. They met men in greenish coats and three-cornered hats, a repellent man in a cloak sitting by a kiosk, and Moberly noticed a lady in an old-fashioned dress sketching on the lawn. Back home, the women concluded that they had seen the gardens as they had been in the 18th century, and that the lady might have been the queen herself. After years of archival research, in 1911 they published under the pseudonyms Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont a book, “An Adventure,” which caused a sensation.
Witnesses
Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924), Oxford academics; their names were made public only in 1931.
Explanations and hypotheses
As early as 1911, Eleanor Sidgwick of the Society for Psychical Research concluded that the women had misinterpreted ordinary events. Analyses showed that the first written accounts were short and almost free of supernatural elements, while later editions grew with details found in the archives. Philippe Jullian, in his 1965 biography of Robert de Montesquiou, suggested the women had stumbled upon a costume party in the gardens. Psychologists speak of an illusion reinforced by later reading. Some researchers, however, maintain that a core of mystery remains.
Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.
Sources
- Charlotte Anne Moberly, Eleanor Jourdain, An Adventure (Macmillan, 1911)
- Terry Castle, Contagious Folly: An Adventure and Its Skeptics (Critical Inquiry 17, 1991)
- Atlas Obscura – Did These Oxford Professors Time Travel from the Victorian Era to the French Revolution? (2024)
More: Wikipedia (en)