The Adventure: check it out here
This book was originally published in 1910
and represents the accounts and research of two English women who had an
experience of some kind of 'timeslip' in the gardens of the Palace of
Versailles outside Paris on August 10th 1901. They apparently walked through
the gardens as they were on August 10th 1792, the day the French monarchy fell
during the French Revolution. They wrote a book about this called The Adventure though the incident is
also known as The Ghosts of the Petit
Trianon.
This account is remarkable for its detail
of the accounts of the two women and the efforts they went to establish the
historical evidence for their belief that they had strayed into the past. They
wrote the book under pseudonyms - Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont - though
their actual names were Charlotte Moberly (1846-1937) and Eleanor Jourdain
(1863-1924). Moberly's father was headmaster at the prestigious Winchester
School and later Bishop of Salisbury. In her account she distances herself from
a belief in ghosts and the occult (an epidemic of Spiritualism was sweeping
Britain and America at that time). Jourdain's father was a vicar of the Church
of England.
Moberly was principal of a hall of
residence for women at Oxford University and Jourdain was to be appointed as
her assistant. Jourdain at that time was working as a tutor in Paris and
Moberly went to visit her there to get to know her better before she took up
the job.
As their accounts show, their visit to
Versailles on 10th August 1901 was one of a number of tourist trips they went
on while Moberly was visiting Jourdain in Paris.
They wrote separate accounts of their visit
three months later in Oxford.
Interestingly, subsequent to The Adventure, Moberly had claimed to
see ghost of the Roman Emperor, Constantine in the Louvre in Paris in 1914.
Jourdain later became principal of St Hugh's at Oxford and there is a report of
almost delusional thought when she became convinced that a German spy was
hiding in the college. Later, her management style caused mass resignations at
the college and in the middle of this scandal, in 1924, she suddenly died.
In 1931, J W Dunne, the author of An Experiment With
Time wrote the introduction to a
new edition of The Adventure and he
said,
"Hence, if Einstein is right, the contents of time are just as
`real’ as the contents of space. Marie Antoinette– body and brain–is sitting in
the Trianon garden now."
You
will see that Moberly's theory is that somehow they were viewing the memories
of Marie Antoinette from 10th August 1792, not that they had stumbled into the
past. To my mind, the idea of a timeslip seems more plausible than reliving a
dead person's memories. I know this is still a pretty controversial view, but I
would base it on Dunne's quote above and evidence from other timeslip type
experiences which I will discuss after the text of The Adventure.
However, there
are problems too with the timeslip explanation. Moberly makes much of the anniversary - that
it was 10th August when they saw these visions and 10th August was the day of
the downfall of French Monarchy (though Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were not
executed for many months). But we see that on 10th August, 1792, the King and
Marie Antoinette were at the Tuileries in central Paris when it was assailed by
revolutionaries - not at Versailles. After leaving the Tuileries for their own
safety, they then retreated to the National Assembly. After a deliberation the
Assembly locked them in the small reporters' box called the logographe. At
the end of that day Marie Antoinette was imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple.
Imbert de
Saint-Amand gives a detailed account of that day in his Marie
Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty (trans. Elizabeth Gilbert Martin)
Also the Count
de Vaudreuil was not present in Versailles on 10th August 1792 as he had left
France in 1789 after the storming of the Bastille. I suppose this is why
Moberly does not feel she walked into the past as it was on 10th August but
into the memories of Marie Antoinette as she remembered Versailles from her
confined prison in the logographe at the National Assembly. She
discusses these points in the chapter Answers to
Questions We Have Been Asked.
Get the full book here
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