The Moberly-Jourdain Incident: the Versailles Time-Slip

Charlotte Anne Moberly was the first Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, and a bishop's daughter. Eleanor Jourdain, a vicar's daughter, was her deputy. Both later insisted they were in perfect health and knew little of the history involved.

Saturday, 10 August 1901. The sky was a little overcast and the sun shaded. The two women set out from the palace for the Petit Trianon and lost their way.

Moberly saw a woman shaking a white cloth from a window. Jourdain saw old farm buildings and an ancient plough. Two dignified officials in long greyish-green coats and small three-cornered hats gave directions. Then a heaviness settled over them. Moberly felt "an extraordinary depression." Jourdain felt as if she were walking in her sleep.

By a small circular kiosk sat a man in a cloak and a large shady hat. His face was very dark and marked by smallpox. The trees looked "flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry." Then came running footsteps. A tall man with a face "glowing red" called out "Mesdames, Mesdames" and waved them on. When Moberly turned to thank him, he was not there. The running began again, close beside them.

At the terrace Moberly saw a lady on the grass, holding out a paper, in a shady white hat. She turned and looked full at them. Jourdain saw no one, yet drew her skirt aside as though someone were near. A young man stepped out of a chapel door, banging it behind him, and showed them round. Inside, a French wedding party walked arm in arm. The afternoon was ordinary again.

2 January 1902. Jourdain went back alone. Two labourers in hooded capes, one bright blue and one red, loaded a cart with sticks. When she looked back, men and cart were gone. Then it was as though a crowd had closed in around her. Women's voices said "Monsieur et Madame" close to her ear. Faint band music played, "diminished in tone, as in a phonograph." She wrote down about 12 bars from memory.

The women returned in 1904, 1906, 1908 and 1910 and spent years in archives. They identified the kiosk man as the Comte de Vaudreuil and the sketching lady as Marie Antoinette. They proposed they had entered "Marie Antoinette's memory" of 10 August 1792, the attack on the Tuileries. In 1911 they published An Adventure as "Elizabeth Morison" and "Frances Lamont."

The Society for Psychical Research was unconvinced. Eleanor Sidgwick put it down to ordinary events and memory error. W. H. Salter's analysis suggested the supposedly early accounts dated from around 1906, leaving "the whole affair in an impenetrable fog of uncertainty." G. W. Lambert thought something paranormal probably happened, but placed the scenes around 1774. The Château de Versailles notes that a later plan shows "a Chinese kiosk had indeed existed in 1774."

Philippe Jullian suggested the women stumbled on Robert de Montesquiou and friends rehearsing tableaux vivants in period costume. Joan Evans, Jourdain's literary executor, came to favour a staged event. Brian Dunning countered that no evidence shows such an event in 1901, and argued the book "had expanded notably each time." Lucille Iremonger pointed to the bond between the two women and a possible folie à deux. No critic alleged deliberate fraud.

Later visitors reported figures in old-fashioned dress at the Trianon, appearing and vanishing. In 1981 Wendy Hiller and Hannah Gordon played the pair in Miss Morison's Ghosts. In 2021 Mark Lamont called the case an unresolved enigma. As Roy Strong put it, the story "retained its hold on the public imagination for half a century."