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The Petit Trianon

Published in January 1911, Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain’s book, An Adventure, contains possibly the most famous of phantom-scenery cases. Written by the percipients of the events, it tells the story of their visits to the palace of the Petit Trianon at Versailles in the early 1900s, when they saw and apparently experienced visions of the 1700s. Charlotte Moberly was the tenth of fifteen children of Win chester headmaster George Moberly, who went on to become Bishop of Salisbury. Devoted to her father, she became his secretary and never married. Like most women of the time, she received little formal education but her upstanding character and social background led to her being appointed (in 1886) Principal of St Hugh’s Hall, at Oxford (later to become St Hugh’s College). Miss Moberly was to live to the age of 90, dying in 1937.

Eleanor Jourdain, born in 1863, was the eldest of ten children of the Rev. Francis Jourdain, vicar of Ashbourne in Derbyshire. Miss Jourdain was educated at Oxford, reading Modern History, and went on to become a teacher first at Tottenham High School, then at a school in Clifton and later principal of her own school in Watford. In 1901 the two ladies were introduced to each other to see whether they could work together at St Hugh’s College.

So they were not that well known to each other when, on 10 August 1901, they set out together from Miss Jourdain’s Paris flat to visit the palace of Versailles. It was four o’clock in the afternoon when Miss Moberly suggested visiting the Petit Trianon, a small house and gardens within the estate at Versailles, presented to Queen Marie—Antoinette in 1774 by Louis XVI. There are two struc tures, some distance apart, known as the Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon just northwest of the main palace of Versailles; and the ladies came first to the Grand Trianon. To have reached the Petit Trianon they ought to have turned down the Allée des Deux Trianons. However, they crossed this road and entered a small lane at right angles to it, not realising that by doing so they were passing the Petit Trianon on their right.

Their route to the Petit Trianon was therefore fairly circuitous and took them around the gardener’s cottage, the theatre and other pavilions. Both ladies experienced feelings of depression and dreariness, a factor that occurs in many cases of people seeing phantom scenery . As they passed what appeared to be the Temple de l’Amour, they saw a man of ‘repulsive appearance’ sitting on the balustrade surrounding the building. (Various suggestions have been made as to who this person might have been, including King Louis himself.) Another man directed them to the right and they came to the rear of the Petit Trianon.

Miss Moberly saw a lady in summer clothes sitting on the lawn below the terrace, though it appears that Miss Jourdain did not. On reaching the terrace a young man directed them to the front of the house and walked around with them until they found the entrance of the Allée des Deux Trianons. Inside the building they followed a group of visitors on a guided tour and then returned to their hotel for tea. During the following week the two ladies discussed the possi bility that the Petit Trianon was haunted as a result of the unnatural depression that they had suffered there, but made no other reference to their visit for some months.

In November 1901, when the two ladies were talking about their visit, they considered it curious that only one of them had seen the lady in a summer dress sitting on the lawn outside the building. So they wrote independent accounts of their experiences to see how closely they matched. Trying to discover whether or not the Petit Trianon was haunted, Miss Jourdain came across a story that Marie- Antoinette herself was often seen sitting outside the Petit Trianon on a certain day in August. Miss Jourdain even suggested that Miss Moberly had seen Marie-Antoinette.

Miss Jourdain revisited the scene on 2 January 1902, first examining the Temple de l’Amour, which she decided was not the building that they had first seen, although they had then believed it to be so; she then headed east towards the Hameau which they had not explored during the earlier visit. Miss Jourdain experienced the same depressing sensation as earlier and at one point observed two labourers loading a cart. She glanced up at the Hameau, glanced back and the cart and labourers were gone.

Miss Jourdain came to a wood and walked through it, observing a man ahead. She became lost in the wood, and heard closer to hand the rustle of silk dresses and women’s voices speaking French. She could also faintly hear the music of a band though she saw nothing. Between 1902 and 1904 Miss Jourdain left her flat in Paris to revisit the Trianon many times; often her visits were in the company of her pupils. Miss Jourdain wrote to Miss Moberly telling her that the topography of the area was never the same as on that earlier visit they had made together.

On 4 July 1904 the two women visited the Petit Trianon again and Miss Moberly confirmed what Miss Jourdain’s letters had told her, that the topography was different, distances seemed shorter, the grounds were less ornate and some features were not visible. There have been many other sightings of apparitions at the Trianon, including a woman in a gold dress seen by a Mr and Mrs Wilkinson in October 1949, and a vision of a man and woman in antiquated peasant costume drawing a small cart behind them, seen in 1938 by Mrs Elizabeth Hatton.

Indeed, in 1910, before An Adventure was even published, a Mr and Mrs Gregory described how, when they had entered the Petit Trianon, they had walked through a wood at the edge of which was a group of small houses; Mrs Gregory saw a woman shaking a cloth from the window of one these. When they read An Adventure after it was published, the couple returned to the Petit Trianon to find that no wood or houses could be found where they had seen them. Mrs Gregory also mentions seeing the same visions of gardeners and so on as those reported by Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain in their book but claims she did not call them to her husband’s attention as they seemed so perfectly ordinary.

The case has been the subject of considerable investigation and controversy. As Hilary Evans argues in his book, Visions, Apparitions, Alien Visitors, there is ‘good reason to think that percipients were right in believing they had somehow shared a vision of the gardens as they had been in the eighteenth century, possibly at the outbreak of the French Revolution’. This would date their visitation to the 1780s.

There is always the possibility, of course, that the descriptions were either fantasy or hoax, but this seems to take no account of the background and character of the people concerned. If they did genuinely experience the 1780s, then the question Hilary Evans raises quite correctly is, ‘Were they transported like time travellers back to that time or did they somehow become involved in a “replay” of events at the time which were brought forward to the 1901 and 1902 period where they were?’ It has been suggested that hauntings may be replays of ‘record ings’ stored in some unknown manner and it is tempting to consider that the extraordinary emotions stirred up by the French Revolution could have created such a recording. However, this would not allow for the apparent interaction between some of the subjects of the vision and the women themselves.

Michael Coleman, in his book The Ghosts of the Trianon, which also contains the complete accounts by the two ladies, concludes, after weighing the research both ‘for’ and ‘against’, that the women experienced nothing unusual. He suggests that the women may have been affected by a combination of drinking at lunchtime and the warmth of the day, resulting in their feeling rather ill. He believes that the women may have seen a present- day re-enactment of former events as part of the pageant, and in any case suggests that the women were seeking to confirm their beliefs rather than investigate their causes. Essex | France | Wiltshire | Wiltshire | Cornwall | Devon | Devon | Devon | Essex | France | Hampshire | Indonesia | Ireland | Isle of Wight | Italy | Kent | Lancashire | London | London | London | London | Norfolk | North Yorkshire | Norway | Norway | Oxford | Oxford | Phenomena | Salop | Suffolk | Surrey | Surrey | Surrey | Unknown | Warwickshire | Wiltshire |