Moberly-Jourdain incident
Encyclopedia
Petit Trianon
The Petit Trianon is a small château located on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in Versailles, France.-Design and construction:...
or Versailles
Versailles
Versailles , a city renowned for its château, the Palace of Versailles, was the de facto capital of the kingdom of France for over a century, from 1682 to 1789. It is now a wealthy suburb of Paris and remains an important administrative and judicial centre...
was an event that occurred on 10 August 1901 in the gardens of the Petit Trianon
Petit Trianon
The Petit Trianon is a small château located on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in Versailles, France.-Design and construction:...
, involving two female academics, Charlotte Anne Moberly
Charlotte Anne Moberly
Charlotte Anne Moberly was an English academic. She was the daughter of George Moberly, and was made the first Principal of St. Hugh's College, Oxford...
(1846–1937) and Eleanor Jourdain
Eleanor Jourdain
Eleanor Jourdain was an English academic and author, and Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, 1915 to 1924. She rose to fame following a claim that she and a fellow teacher had slipped back in time to the period of the French Revolution while on a trip to Versailles, known as the...
(1863–1924). The women were both from educated backgrounds; Moberly's father was a teacher and a bishop
Bishop
A bishop is an ordained or consecrated member of the Christian clergy who is generally entrusted with a position of authority and oversight. Within the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox Churches, in the Assyrian Church of the East, in the Independent Catholic Churches, and in the...
, and Jourdain's father was a vicar
Vicar
In the broadest sense, a vicar is a representative, deputy or substitute; anyone acting "in the person of" or agent for a superior . In this sense, the title is comparable to lieutenant...
. During a trip to Versailles, they visited the Petit Trianon
Petit Trianon
The Petit Trianon is a small château located on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in Versailles, France.-Design and construction:...
, a small chateau in the grounds of the Palace of Versailles
Palace of Versailles
The Palace of Versailles , or simply Versailles, is a royal château in Versailles in the Île-de-France region of France. In French it is the Château de Versailles....
, where they allegedly experienced a time slip
Time slip
A time slip is an alleged paranormal phenomenon in which a person, or group of people, travel through time via unknown means...
, and saw Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette ; 2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was an Archduchess of Austria and the Queen of France and of Navarre. She was the fifteenth and penultimate child of Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I....
as well as other people of the same period. After researching the history of the palace, and comparing notes of their experience, they published their work pseudonymously in a book entitled An Adventure, under the names of Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont, in 1911. Their story caused a sensation, and was subject to much ridicule.
Background
George Moberly
George Moberly , English divine, was educated at Winchester and Balliol College, Oxford.After a distinguished academic career he became head master of Winchester in 1835. This post he resigned in 1866, and retired to the Rectory of St. Mary's Church, Brighstone, Isle of Wight, he was also a Canon...
, was the headmaster of Winchester College
Winchester College
Winchester College is an independent school for boys in the British public school tradition, situated in Winchester, Hampshire, the former capital of England. It has existed in its present location for over 600 years and claims the longest unbroken history of any school in England...
and later Bishop of Salisbury
Bishop of Salisbury
The Bishop of Salisbury is the ordinary of the Church of England's Diocese of Salisbury in the Province of Canterbury.The diocese covers much of the counties of Wiltshire and Dorset...
. In 1886 Moberly became the first Principal of a hall of residence for young women, St. Hugh's College
St Hugh's College, Oxford
St Hugh's College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. It is located on a fourteen and a half acre site on St Margaret's Road, to the North of the city centre. It was founded in 1886 as a women's college, and accepted its first male students in its centenary year in 1986...
in Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
. It became apparent that Moberly needed someone to help run the college, and Jourdain was asked to become Moberly's assistant.
Ashbourne, Derbyshire
Ashbourne is a small market town in the Derbyshire Dales, England. It has a population of 10,302.The town advertises itself as 'The Gateway to Dovedale'.- Local customs :...
in Derbyshire
Derbyshire
Derbyshire is a county in the East Midlands of England. A substantial portion of the Peak District National Park lies within Derbyshire. The northern part of Derbyshire overlaps with the Pennines, a famous chain of hills and mountains. The county contains within its boundary of approx...
. She was the sister of art historian Margaret Jourdain
Margaret Jourdain
Margaret Jourdain was a prominent writer on English furniture and decoration. She began her career ghost-writing as Francis Lenygon for the firm of Lenygon & Morant, dealers in furnishings with a royal appointment, who were also the fabricators of carefully crafted reproductions, especially of...
and mathematician Philip Jourdain. She went to school in Manchester
Manchester
Manchester is a city and metropolitan borough in Greater Manchester, England. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Manchester was 498,800. Manchester lies within one of the UK's largest metropolitan areas, the metropolitan county of Greater...
, unlike most girls of the time who were educated at home. Jourdain was also the author of several textbooks, ran a school of her own, and after the incident became the vice-Principal of St. Hugh's College. Before Jourdain was appointed, it was decided that the two women should get to know one another better; Jourdain owned an apartment in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
where she tutored English children, and so Moberly went to stay with her.
The incident
As part of several trips, they decided to visit the Palace of VersaillesPalace of Versailles
The Palace of Versailles , or simply Versailles, is a royal château in Versailles in the Île-de-France region of France. In French it is the Château de Versailles....
, as they were both unfamiliar with it. On 10 August 1901, they travelled by train to Versailles
Versailles
Versailles , a city renowned for its château, the Palace of Versailles, was the de facto capital of the kingdom of France for over a century, from 1682 to 1789. It is now a wealthy suburb of Paris and remains an important administrative and judicial centre...
. They did not think much of the palace after touring it, so they decided to walk through the gardens to the Petit Trianon
Petit Trianon
The Petit Trianon is a small château located on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles in Versailles, France.-Design and construction:...
. On the way, they reached the Grand Trianon
Grand Trianon
The Grand Trianon was built in the northwestern part of the Domain of Versailles at the request of Louis XIV, as a retreat for the King and his maîtresse en titre of the time, the marquise de Montespan, and as a place where the King and invited guests could take light meals away from the strict...
and found it was closed to the public. They travelled with a Baedeker
Baedeker
Verlag Karl Baedeker is a Germany-based publisher and pioneer in the business of worldwide travel guides. The guides, often referred as simply "Baedekers" , contain important introductions, descriptions of buildings, of museum collections, etc., written by the best specialists, and...
guidebook, but the two women soon became lost after missing the turn for the main avenue, Allée des Deux Trianons. They passed this road, and entered a lane, where unknown to them they passed their destination. Moberly noticed a woman shaking a white cloth out of a window and Jourdain noticed an old deserted farmhouse, outside of which was an old plough. At this point they claimed that a feeling of oppression and dreariness came over them. They then saw some men that looked like palace gardeners, who told them to go straight on. Moberly later described the men as "very dignified officials, dressed in long greyish green coats with small three-cornered hats." Jourdain noticed a cottage with a woman and a girl in the doorway. The woman was holding out a jug to the girl. Jourdain described it as a "tableau vivant", a living picture, much like Madame Tussaud's waxworks. Moberly did not observe the cottage, but felt the atmosphere change. She wrote: "Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless, like wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees."
Smallpox
Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning "spotted", or varus, meaning "pimple"...
; his complexion was very dark. The expression was evil and yet unseeing, and though I did not feel that he was looking particularly at us, I felt a repugnance to going past him. A man later described as "tall... with large dark eyes, and crisp curling black hair under a large sombrero hat" came up to them, and showed them the way to the Petit Trianon.
Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette ; 2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was an Archduchess of Austria and the Queen of France and of Navarre. She was the fifteenth and penultimate child of Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I....
. Jourdain however did not see the lady.
After this, they were directed round to the entrance and joined a party of other visitors. After touring the house, they had tea at the Hotel des Reservoirs before returning to Jourdain's apartment.
Aftermath
After leaving Versailles, neither Jourdain nor Moberly mentioned the incident to one another until a week later. Moberly wrote a letter about the trip to her sister, and when she got to the afternoon of the Versailles incident she asked Jourdain if she thought the Petit Trianon was haunted. Jourdain told her that she thought it was. Three months later in Oxford they compared their notes, and decided to write separate accounts of what happened, and research the history of the Trianon. In doing so, they found that on 10 August 1792, the Tuileries palace in Paris was besieged10th of August (French Revolution)
On 10 August 1792, during the French Revolution, revolutionary Fédéré militias — with the backing of a new municipal government of Paris that came to be known as the "insurrectionary" Paris Commune and ultimately supported by the National Guard — besieged the Tuileries palace. King Louis XVI and...
, the king's Swiss guard
Swiss Guard
Swiss Guards or Schweizergarde is the name given to the Swiss soldiers who have served as bodyguards, ceremonial guards, and palace guards at foreign European courts since the late 15th century. They have had a high reputation for discipline, as well as loyalty to their employers...
s were massacred, and the monarchy itself was abolished six weeks later.
They visited the Trianon gardens again on several occasions, but were unable to trace the path they took. Various landmarks such as the kiosk and the bridge were missing, and the grounds were full of people. Trying to come up with an explanation, they wondered if they had stumbled across a private party, or an event booked that day. However they found that nothing had been booked that afternoon. During their research, they thought they recognised the man by the kiosk as the Comte de Vaudreuil, a friend of Marie Antoinette, who herself had been thought to have been seen by Moberly.
Convinced that the grounds were haunted, they decided to publish their findings in a book An Adventure (1911), under the pseudonyms of Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont. The book, containing the claim that Marie Antoinette had been encountered in 1901, caused a sensation. However, many critics did not take it seriously on the grounds of the implausibilities and inconsistencies that it was thought to contain. A review of the book in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
Society for Psychical Research
The Society for Psychical Research is a non-profit organisation in the United Kingdom. Its stated purpose is to understand "events and abilities commonly described as psychic or paranormal by promoting and supporting important research in this area" and to "examine allegedly paranormal phenomena...
suggested that the women had misinterpreted normal events that they had experienced.The review is reprinted in . In 1903, an old map of the Trianon gardens was found and showed a bridge that the two women had claimed to have crossed that had not been on any other map. The identity of the authors of An Adventure was not made public until 1931.
Both women are reported to have had many paranormal experiences before and after their adventure. In one of them Moberly claimed to have seen in the Louvre in 1914 an apparition of the Roman emperor Constantine, a man of unusual height wearing a gold crown and a toga; he was not observed by anybody else. During the First World War Jourdain, the dominant personality of the pair and who had succeeded as Principal of St. Hugh's, became convinced that a German spy was hiding in the college. After developing increasingly autocratic behaviour, she died suddenly in 1924 in the middle of an academic scandal over her leadership of the college, her conduct having provoked mass resignations of academic staff. Moberly died in 1937.
The story of the adventure was made into a TV movie, Miss Morison's Ghosts, in 1981. The incident is said to have exerted an influence on J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...
's views and work.
Some explanations
In addition to the explanation by the women that they had been caught up in what is now called a time slipTime slip
A time slip is an alleged paranormal phenomenon in which a person, or group of people, travel through time via unknown means...
and had observed ghosts from the past, a non-supernatural explanation of the events was proposed by Philippe Jullian
Philippe Jullian
Philippe Jullian was a French illustrator, art historian, biographer, aesthete, novelist and dandy.Jullian was born in Bordeaux in 1922...
in his 1965 biography of the aristocratic decadent French poet Robert de Montesquiou
Robert de Montesquiou
Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac , was a French aesthete, Symbolist poet, art collector and dandy....
. At the time of Moberly and Jourdain's excursion to Versailles Montesquiou lived nearby and reportedly gave parties in the grounds where his friends dressed in period costume and performed tableaux vivants as part of the party entertainments. Moberly and Jourdain may have inadvertently stumbled into a rehearsal for one of these performances. The Marie-Antoinette figure could have been a society lady or a cross-dresser, the pockmarked man Montesquiou himself. It was suggested that a gathering of the French decadent avant-garde of the time could have made a sinister impression on the two middle-class Edwardian spinsters who would have been little used to such company.
In a review of the history of the Moberly-Jourdain adventure and the extensive public reaction to it Terry Castle
Terry Castle
Terry Castle is an American literary scholar. Once described by Susan Sontag as "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," has published eight books, including the anthology The Literature of Lesbianism, which won the Lambda Literary Editor's Choice Award...
noted with skepticism the claim that a shared delusion may have arisen out of a lesbian
Lesbian
Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...
folie à deux
Folie à deux
-Further reading:*Halgin, R. & Whitbourne, S. Abnormal Psychology: Clinical Perspectives on Psychological Disorders. McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0072817216...
between the two women. Castle concludes that, when all proposed explanations have been considered, a core of mystery remains as much in relation to the psychological dynamics of the pair as to any aspects of the paranormal associated with their story.
Without fully endorsing the de Montesquiou explanation, Michael Coleman carefully examined the story, and in particular the two published versions of the ladies' accounts (the earlier-written of which, from November 1901, had only previously been published in the second, small print-run, edition of An Adventure in 1913), and concluded that the more widely-available texts, as published in the 1911 and later editions, had been considerably embroidered well after the events described and after the ladies had begun their investigations, while the original accounts had little or nothing to suggest a supernatural experience. He also questioned the rigour and reliability of the ladies' subsequent researches, pointing out that few, if any, of their informants are named and that most of their literary and historical references were taken from unreliable sources.