On they wandered to their most sinister encounter. On the steps of a kind of round summerhouse sat a man wearing ‘a cloak and a large shady hat’. He ‘slowly turned his face, which was marked by smallpox: his complexion was very dark. The expression was very evil and yet unseeing …’ Suddenly, they heard the sound of someone running, and a young man appeared as if from nowhere, shouting that they were going in the wrong direction. He wore a dark cloak ‘wrapped across him like a scarf and quaint buckle shoes.
At last they reached the Petit Trianon, where Miss Moberly, but curiously not Miss Jourdain, noticed a woman apparently sketching. Again, she seemed to be dressed in eighteenth-century style. Finally the women met a young man who directed them to the entrance. They both recalled that he had come out of a nearby building, slamming the door behind him.
Had the two English tourists glimpsed scenes from the past? When they compared notes, no other answer seemed possible; for what other explanation could there be for their encounters with people dressed in eighteenth-century clothes?
‘Do you think that the Petit Trianon is haunted?’ asked Miss Moberly.
‘Yes I do,’ replied Miss Jourdain.
Ten years later, their story was published, written pseudonymously and bolstered with research carried out at Versailles and in French archives. Despite its bland title, An Adventure was a sensation, for the women had concluded that during their walk in 1901 they had ‘dropped in’ on Versailles as it was in the 1780s, just before the French Revolution – the time of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI.
Do their claims bear scrutiny? Three-quarters of a century of controversy and analysis of An Adventure have thrown up arguments both for and against.
Supporters of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain point first to the findings of the research undertaken by the two women. These include their claim that the ‘very dignified officials’ they met early in their walk were wearing eighteenth-century royal livery, quite different to what was being worn at Versailles in 1901.
The woman whom Miss Moberly had seen sitting near the Petit Trianon was identified as Marie-Antoinette herself from a contemporary portrait, and the journal of the queen’s dressmaker provided the information that Marie-Antoinette had owned a dress exactly like the one the figure had been wearing in 1901. Much was made of the apparent correspondence of the landscape seen by Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain, altered since the Revolution, to the Versailles of the eighteenth century.
Miss Jourdain provided another telling argument in favour of the time-slip claim. A few months after the first experience she returned to Versailles and again met people who seemed to belong more to the eighteenth than the twentieth century, including two curiously dressed men loading sticks into a cart.
After consulting the Versailles wages book, Miss Jourdain concluded she had seen the ‘cart with two horses (almost certainly requiring two men)’ which had been hired for picking up wood in 1789. She also reported hearing strange music floating from afar which she later identified as ‘the chief motifs of the light opera of the eighteenth century’ – operas which, in many cases, had not been available since they were first played.
Further back-up came later from other people who claimed that they, too, had seen figures from.the past at Versailles. Mr and Mrs Crooke and their son Stephen, who lived near the park in 1907 and 1908, said they saw several figures, including a ‘sketching lady’ like the one Miss Moberly had seen outside the Trianon, and a man in a three-cornered hat.
In 1928 Ann Lambert, a seventeen-year-old English schoolgirl, and her former teacher, Miss Clare M. Burrow, came upon a strangely dressed gardener at Versailles. They had gone through a little gate and there he was, wearing a dingy brown corduroy jacket, knee breeches, black hose, buckle shoes and a hat turned up at the sides.
He spoke in a curious way. To Miss Burrow, an accomplished linguist, it sounded perplexingly like an old, out-dated form of French, current 150 years before. An even stranger sight greeted them when they reached the Petit Trianon. A group of people – six or eight, Miss Lambert thought – stood on the lawn outside. Some were playing musical instruments; an elegant man and a beautiful woman were engaged in intimate conversation.
All were arrayed in the most dazzling eighteenth-century costumes. With all the briskness of her calling, Miss Burrow ushered her fascinated pupil onward into the Trianon. ‘It must be a pageant,’ she said. Yet months later she confessed that she had made enquiries and had discovered that no pageant had been rehearsed or performed at Versailles that day. Even more puzzling was the revelation that the gate through which they had passed before meeting the gardener had apparently been sealed up for more than 100 years.
At least one Frenchman claims to have seen the ghosts of Versailles. Robert Philippe, an art teacher and cabinetmaker, was walking in the park with his parents one June day in the 1930s, when he found himself obliged by a sudden call of nature to go behind a tree. There, to his embarrassment, he felt a presence. A mysterious woman had appeared by his side, as if from nowhere. Quite unabashed, she engaged him in conversation.
Did she live in Paris? asked the nonplussed M. Philippe. No, at the Trianon. ‘But I thought the Trianon was uninhabited.’ ‘Yes,’ came the reply, ‘but not for me.’ The young man looked away for a moment and relit a cigarette. When he looked up, the woman had gone. His parents, who had been waiting nearby, had seen no one and had imagined that, for some reason, their son had been talking to himself behind the tree.
Nevertheless, the sceptics have marshalled a formidable case against the claims of the two ‘adventurers’. They have pointed out that the descriptions of the people encountered are so vague that it is, for example, impossible to decide whether they were wearing authentic eighteenth-century dress or clothes that were merely rustic or somewhat old-fashioned. Why, they ask, did the two women not discuss their experience immediately after the walk, over their tea at the Hotel des Reservoirs – instead of waiting a week to compare notes? Why do their accounts of the ‘adventure’, written at various times before the book was published, differ markedly? In particular, why do telling details, missing from the earliest versions, suddenly appear in later ones?
Perhaps most crucial of all is the women’s reluctance to look for, and accept, a natural explanation for the events of that summer afternoon. They were, after all, in unfamiliar surroundings and had lost their way in a maze of pathways and thickets; the weather was sultry and there was an oppressive, brooding atmosphere – the kind that often precedes a thunderstorm. In such circumstances imagination can work overtime, and even the most respectable of academic ladies may be forgiven for indulging in romantic reverie, especially since, as one critic has put it,
there are few places in the world in which it is easier to imagine ghosts than the vast palace of Versailles. The echoing halls of the great chateau, the labyrinthine walks of the main park with their stone benches and frozen statuary, the haunted gardens of the Petit Trianon – all are alike murmurous with the footfalls of history.
Dame Joan Evans, an Oxford art historian and friend and literary executor of the two authors of An Adventure, was one of those who settled for a down-to-earth explanation. She discovered from a book published in the 1960s that a rakish aristocrat called Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezenzac had been obsessed with the fashions of the eighteenth century and often wore clothes of the period. Moreover, he frequented the gardens of Versailles and organized tableaux vivants or pageants in which he and his cronies wore eighteenth-century costume. Dame Joan concluded that Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain had stumbled upon one of the count’s rehearsals and that all the people they had met in the gardens had been acting.
Miss Moberly is known to have mistaken a real person for a ghost on at least one occasion. Two years after An Adventure was published she visited the Louvre in Paris, where she noticed an extraordinary man. He had ‘a small golden coronal on his head, and wore a loose toga-like dress of some light colour’.
After much research, she decided that she had seen the ghost of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who had marched in procession down the road over which the Louvre was later built. But this exotic little scenario was demolished in the 1960s when a Sunday newspaper revealed that there had been an artist living in Paris at the time of the ‘vision’ who had gone about dressed as a Roman, complete with gold crown, in protest at the ugliness of current fashions.
In a letter to The Times it was suggested that Miss Moberly had also jumped to the wrong conclusion in her identification of the ‘sketching lady’: