INDEPENDENT FIELD ARCHIVEThe Petit Trianon adventure
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Gardens of the Petit Trianon, Versailles, France · English
The Petit Trianon adventure
The Moberly–Jourdain incident · An Adventure (1911)
Told, never investigated
AI illustration · imagined scene, not an evidence photograph On 10 August 1901 two Englishwomen walking to the Petit Trianon at Versailles saw people and buildings they later decided belonged to the time of Marie Antoinette, as if they had entered an act of the queen's memory. They wrote their accounts three months later, after talking it over, and published them under false names in 1911; by Wikipedia's account they were Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain of St Hugh's College, Oxford, named publicly in 1931. The Society for Psychical Research, after a correspondent walked the route with their accounts, judged that they had seen real people and real places, decked out by memory.
Earliest written source: The two women's own accounts, dated November 1901, printed in An Adventure by "Elizabeth Morison" and "Frances Lamont" (London: Macmillan, 1911)
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 25 (1911), review of An Adventure
Tradition · not evidence