Clock goes back at Marie Antoinette’s palace

The French news agency AFP filmed this 90-second report in September 2008, just before the Petit Trianon reopened after a year-long restoration. The aim, as a curator explains on camera, was to “freeze time” at the moment Marie Antoinette left Versailles in October 1789, never to return, so that visitors feel transported into her world rather than walking through a museum.

The camera follows the results: wiring and modern systems hidden beneath floors and behind panelling, stoves, silverware and royal porcelain back in place, and the queen’s apartments decorated with the flowers and fruit of her favourite gardens. A historian describes the Trianon as the place that reveals most about Marie Antoinette’s personality, because here, unlike at the main palace, she could choose the colours, shapes and craftsmen herself. The report ends on a trunk that vanished during the Revolution and resurfaced in 2007, and on the price of the work — more than 75 million dollars, according to AFP.

There are no ghosts in this report, but it is the best possible companion to the Petit Trianon’s ghost story. On August 10, 1901, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain of St Hugh’s Hall, Oxford, lost their way in these grounds and later became convinced they had seen the estate as it looked in Marie Antoinette’s day, perhaps even the queen herself sketching on the lawn. The restoration shown here tries, quite deliberately, to recreate the same moment they thought they had stepped into.

One small correction: the report says Louis XV built the Trianon for Madame de Pompadour. He did commission it with her in mind, but she died in 1764, four years before it was finished. As for the 1901 “adventure,” skeptics have long pointed to costumed gatherings held nearby, to ordinary gardeners and visitors, and to the way the women’s account grew more detailed between their first notes and their 1911 book.