The story of the Versailles time-travel incident
France’s Palace of Versailles is a marvelous example of 17th-century architecture, spread across 2,000 acres of gardens and fountains.
And Petit Trianon is a small chateau within its premises that was given by King Louis XVI to his new wife Queen Marie Antoinette as her private special sanctuary. The chateau was Marie Antoinette’s ‘place of solitude’ where she can escape the prying eyes of the courtiers, nobles, and diplomats.
The Petit Trianon is the place where the story of Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain begins. After completing the Palace of Versailles, they decided to take a stroll through the Petit Trianon. Somehow they missed the right turn and entered into an unknown lane.
Things were very unusual in this lane.
They kept walking and encountered some strange people on the way. They saw dignified officials, dressed in ‘long greyish-green coats’ with small three-cornered hats. They saw a cottage with a woman and a girl standing in a doorway; the woman was holding out a jug to the girl and the girl was reaching up for it — and yet somehow the scene was lifeless, just like a painting.
They spoke to a gentleman with a ‘strange’ accent of French and wearing a period ‘costume’ and a couple of guards wearing a ‘strange’ dress for the time. Both of them felt a sort of ‘uneasiness’ or ‘stillness ‘in the air as Moberly writes in her book.
“Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees seemed to become flat and lifeless as wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees.”
The winding path took Moberly and Jourdain over a rustic bridge and they finally reached the Petit Trianon. There, the biggest surprise was waiting for them.
They saw a lady in a light summer dress, with long hair beneath a white hat, sitting on the grass in front of the chateau, sketching. Moberly was confused and thought the woman was a tourist who had come to sketch the gardens. But on looking closer she looked exactly like Marie Antoinette after remembering a portrait of her she had seen in an exhibition.
Can she be Marie Antoinette? Is the Petit Trianon haunted? The women were deeply disturbed by the events as they hurried back retracing their steps back towards the palace gardens. On their way back they found the strangely dressed officials ‘missing’, the woman with the jug was also not there and the rustic bridge on which they had climbed was not existing anymore.
It was as if everything was a dream.
They were convinced that what they saw on that day was something unreal. Going back, they did some research and found a 1783 map that showed the missing sites. The bridge, the cottage, and the garden in which Marie Antoinette sketched, all appeared exactly where they had seen them. In 1908, Moberly and Jourdain also found the journal of Madame Eloffe, the queen’s dressmaker who had stitched the same dress that they had seen Marie Antoinette wearing on that day.
They went back many times and tried to find the same path again but without any success. They finally decided to write their experiences in a book using pseudonyms as they did not want to tarnish the stellar reputations that they had earned over decades of teaching.
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