It may not be so unusual as it seems
I thought she was a tourist, but that her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual
“The ladies whose Adventure is described in these pages have for various reasons preferred not to disclose their real names,” the Publishers’ Note opens the book, “but the signatures appended to the Preface are the only fictitious words in the book.”
The women – billed as Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont – don’t say precisely why they’ve opted for anonymity in the Preface to 1911’s An Adventure. They do, however, describe why they’ve otherwise chosen to “speak openly” on the pages that follow. First, some already know parts of the story – so they’ve decided to fill in the gaps. Second, they’ve collected sufficient evidence to present their case.
And third, “conditions are changing at Versailles, and in a short time, facts which were unknown, and circumstances which were unusual, may soon become commonplaces, and will lose their force as evidence that some curious psychological conditions must have been present, either in ourselves, or in the place.”
A reprint 20 years after the original – and six years after the death of one of the coauthors – finally revealed the identities of the woman who penned the volume. In doing so, it also shone a light on precisely why they’d chosen anonymity. Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain had commanded respect as the principal and vice principal of St Hugh's Hall, an all-women’s constituent college of the University of Oxford.
The decision to remain anonymous was a canny one. As the book captured the public imagination (selling 11,000 copies in its first year), the pair’s story was greeted with academic derision – at best somewhat sympathetic to a perceived shared hallucination and at worst a deeply misogynistic denunciation of female hysteria. In one the more colorful theories put forth, the women had simply happened upon a dress party and spotted the poet Robert de Montesquiou donning neoclassical women’s clothing.
Moberly and Jourdain had settled on their own explanation of what transpired on that August visit to the Palace of Versailles. A spur of the moment decision to head to Marie Antoinette’s former on-site residence, the Petit Trianon, preceded the arrival of the now-infamous events. The mood shifted to something far more ominous, as the two women encountered a series of strange figures on the ground, culminating as Moberly spotted a pretty woman in a white hat and summer dress sketching trees from the grass.
“I thought she was a tourist, but that her dress was old-fashioned and rather unusual (though people were wearing fichu bodices that summer),” the pair write. “I looked straight at her; but some indescribable feeling made me turn away annoyed at her being there. “
Returning home to England, the duo grew increasingly convinced that something entirely out of the ordinary had occurred. They found answers poring over records in the French National Archives. It was, they opined, a haunting or a time slip. The woman sketching on the grass had been none other than Marie Antoinette. They had also encountered members of her Swiss guard and other historical figures on August 10th – coincidentally the date of insurrection of the Tuileries Palace, a defining moment of the French revolution.
“We wondered whether we had inadvertently entered within an act of the Queen’s memory when alive, and whether this explained our curious sensation of being completely shut in and oppressed,” they wrote. “What more likely, we thought, than that during those hours in the Hall of the Assembly, or in the Conciergerie, she had gone back in such vivid memory to other Augusts spent at Trianon that some impress of it was imparted to the place?”
In spite of much contemporary criticism, both Moberly and Jourdain and spent the remainder of their lives convinced that they had happened into one of Antoinette’s vivid memories that August day in 1901. In the footnotes to An Adventure, they had no particular insight into why they, of all people, were chosen. They did, however, posit that perhaps these manner of encounters were more common than anyone knew.
It’s just that most people simply never follow through.
“We are constantly asked why we, of all people, should have had such an adventure?” Moberly and Jourdain asked. “We are equally puzzled; and have come to think that it may not be so unusual as it seems. We can imagine that people, even if they suspected anything unusual (which they might easily not do), may have thought it best not to follow it up. The peculiarity in our case may simply have been that two persons were equally able to consider the circumstances, and did do so: that we found there was available evidence, and that we had the opportunity for obtaining it.”
Sources:
An Adventure https://archive.org/details/adventurewithapp00mobe/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater
The Versailles Effect: Objects, Lives, and Afterlives of the Domaine Edited by Mark Ledbury and Robert Wellington