Petit Trianon, Versailles

The Petit Trianon is a small neoclassical palace in the grounds of Versailles, designed by Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV and completed in 1768. Louis XVI gave it to his young queen, Marie Antoinette, who made it her private retreat and surrounded it with a romantic English-style garden, a Temple of Love and a make-believe peasant hamlet. After the Revolution the palace passed through many hands until, in 1867, Empress Eugénie turned it into a museum to the memory of the executed queen.

On the afternoon of 10 August 1901, Charlotte Anne Moberly, the first principal of St Hugh’s Hall in Oxford, and Eleanor Jourdain, who would later succeed her, walked from the palace towards the Petit Trianon and got lost. They later described a strange, oppressive mood; men in long greyish-green coats and three-cornered hats who directed them onward; a pockmarked man in a cloak sitting by a garden kiosk; a cottage where a woman handed a jug to a girl like a scene from a waxworks; and, according to Moberly, a fair-haired lady sketching on the lawn in an old-fashioned dress. Only weeks later did the two compare notes and decide that the place was haunted.

After years of research into the gardens’ history, they concluded that they had glimpsed the Trianon as it had been in 1789 – or that they had somehow entered Marie Antoinette’s own memories of 10 August 1792, the day the Tuileries palace was stormed. Their book, An Adventure, appeared in 1911 under the pen names Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont and became a sensation; their real identities were only made public in 1931.

Critics were skeptical from the start. A reviewer for the Society for Psychical Research argued that the women had misread ordinary sights. In 1965 the biographer Philippe Jullian suggested they had stumbled on a costumed garden party staged by the poet Robert de Montesquiou, who lived nearby and was known for tableaux vivants. Later researchers, comparing the women’s first written accounts from late 1901 with the published book, found that the supernatural details had grown considerably in the retelling. The story nonetheless remains the classic case of a “time slip” and is still debated by parapsychologists and literary historians alike.

Moberly and Jourdain described a dreamlike, flattened landscape where “no wind stirred the trees”, figures in 18th-century dress, buildings and a bridge that they could not find again, and a woman they believed was Marie Antoinette. Later visitors have occasionally reported similar experiences in the Trianon gardens, usually after reading the book.

The encounter unfolded along the paths between the Grand Trianon and the Petit Trianon, near the Temple of Love (Temple de l’Amour), the Belvedere and the lawn in front of the Petit Trianon’s terrace.

An Adventure went through several editions and inspired the TV film Miss Morison’s Ghosts (1981) and BBC radio dramatisations. It is a staple of books on time slips, and the Temple of Love and the queen’s gardens draw visitors who know the story.