They went up onto the terrace about the house and were approaching an unshuttered window when a man emerged from the doorway of a chapel standing close by. He called to them, and told them they must enter the house from the front. Guiding them down through the French gardens, on the west side of the house, it seemed to the two ladies that he regarded them with concealed amusement. He led them to an entrance to the drive. And with that Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain stepped back into the twentieth century.
They joined a French wedding party in the front entrance hall, and were conducted with them through the building. The feeling of unnaturalness and depression vanished; but not, says Miss Jourdain, until they had actually reached the front entrance to the Petit Trianon. Following the tour of the building they took a carriage and drove back to Versailles.
Upon their return to Paris the two ladies discussed their experience, and wondered about the strange persons they had encountered, and the weird feeling of oppression they both acknowledged to have known. But it wasn’t until three months later, in November, they discovered that Miss Moberly had seen the woman outside the house and Miss Jourdain had not. Convinced then their experience had been no ordinary one, they determined to write separate reports of the expedition to the Petit Trianon, and to investigate the history of the locale.
The description I have given of this expedition is a condensation of these reports. The original statements, written and signed by the two ladies, are preserved in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, England, together with the written testimony of more than twenty persons who had heard the ladies describe the Gardens as they had seen them before it was known that there was anything unusual in the descriptions.
In this library, also, are Miss Jourdain’s notebooks, in which the daily results of her researches were noted, and all the original letters which were exchanged by the ladies during the investigation.
It was toward the identification of the persons they had seen that the early investigations were directed. Beginning with the two guards who had first given them directions, each of these persons—their clothing, their appearance—was investigated down to the minutest detail, even to the stockings worn by the guards.
Informed persons at Versailles told the ladies it was impossible they could have seen guards dressed in green at the Trianon, unless the men were masqueraders, for green was royal livery, worn by no attendants at the Trianon of this century. But that green liveries had been worn there in the past was established beyond question.
So with the others. In all, they had encountered eight persons, but never more than two at a time. These persons, they learned through years of research, were attired in the morning costume of the closing years of the eighteenth century. “We have never,” say the authors, eerily, “seen them exactly portrayed in any pictures of the costumes of that period.” It is weirdly like talking to a being from that Past; an observer aware of the minute discrepancies which must have crept into all our histories, into all our picturizations of things of the Past.
On the day of January 2, 1902, Miss Jourdain went again to Versailles, her second visit. She went directly to the Temple de l’Amour, and ascertained that it was not the building—the kiosk—seen on their first visit. From here she went on to the Hamlet, a group of cottages and farm buildings situated near a lake. On her way to the Hamlet she again became conscious of the strange feeling of oppression which had been so marked a characteristic of the first visit to the Gardens. Miss Jourdain says it was as though she “had crossed a line and was suddenly in a circle of influence.” That statement is potently significant. Does, or did, some strange, time-bridging extra dimension offer a threshold to this time, this place, in the Gardens of the Trianon?
At the Hamlet itself the feeling of gloom was very strong. After leaving the Hamlet she entered a thick woods, set with a multitude of paths, in which Miss Jourdain wandered for some time. She heard voices speaking in French, and the faint music of stringed instruments, a few bars of which she was able to write from memory afterward. Authorities later recognized in these bars the idiom of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
A gardener gave her directions, and when she had returned to Versailles she inquired about the music, and was informed that no band had played in the Gardens that day. No such gardener as she had seen was employed in the Trianon of the present.
During the next two years Miss Jourdain made several visits to the Trianon, and never was she able to find the paths they had followed in 1901, nor even the woods in which she had wandered and heard the music!
Of this she informed Miss Moberly, and on July 4, 1904, the two friends returned again to the Gardens of the Trianon, set upon finding the paths they had followed on their memorable first visit.
They were utterly unsuccessful. Paths, buildings, bridge, woods, were gone, vanished, replaced by a new and different topography! The landscape they had seen—if it ever had existed—existed no longer!
Their bewilderment can be imagined. What more uncanny sensation than to find the supposedly stable earth fluctuant, shifting, insecure, or to see such solid things as trees, hills, buildings, vanish into nothing, and leave less trace than last year’s leaves? Even though she had been prepared for this change by the letters of her friend, Miss Moberly was shaken and astonished. She had not, she says, “expected such complete disillusionment.”
And so their investigations turned from the people seen to the landscape itself, and the research into historical topography which was to last for years began. In the face of the most contradictory evidence, and against the statements of authorities, they persisted that their descriptions were accurate. And slowly, piece by piece, they proved that each feature of the landscape as they remembered it had at one time existed!
Evidence on more than seventy points of minute historical detail, concerned primarily with alteration and rearrangement of the land surface, was assembled, substantiating in full the descriptions of the Gardens given by Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain in 1901—but placing the Gardens as they described them in the year 1789!
This second adventure, although not as thrilling as that walk through the Gardens of the Trianon in 1901, is, in one way, just as important. Its results, the evidence so slowly compiled and so unanswerable, make of that walk something more than an intriguing story; make of it a startling question, challenging all man’s knowledge, all the boundaries and limits he has set about the universe, and about reality. It is a signpost, lettered in a language we do not know, and pointing into the dark night of the unknown.
The papers dealing with their adventure, and with the subsequent historical research, are preserved, as has been said, in the Bodleian Library. At the Archives Nationales and the Bibliotheque Nationale, where these researches were conducted, are the dates of each of Miss Jourdain’s visits, and her signature on each occasion.
This evidence, vouched for by these institutions, answers the questions of those who ask what proof there is that the “vision” preceded the investigation, and of those who suggest that, after learning through research or by conversation some detail of the topography of the Trianon Gardens, the ladies unconsciously believed themselves to be remembering those details from the occasion of their walk in the Gardens in 1901. Such a theory is utterly inconsistent with the documents which these institutions possess.
Another theory advanced was that Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain had seen actors in costume for a fete, or a motion picture, for which the Gardens were a setting.
The two ladies investigated this possibility thoroughly, entering into correspondence with film companies, and examining the available records. M. Perate, coadjutator at Versailles, informed them there had been a fete, in June, 1901. Miss Jourdain checked this in the Day-book of Permissions. No fete had been held in August, 1901, nor had any photographs been taken in that month. Those photographs taken in June were taken at the Hamlet, in a different part of the Gardens. M. Perates letter, definit
ely asserting the fact that no photographs were taken in August, 1901, is with the other papers at the Bodleian.
With characteristic thoroughness the two friends did not rest with this, but sought confirmation from the photographers of Paris, who assured them that no photographs had, to their knowledge, been taken in the Trianon Gardens on August to, 1901.
A writer in Chamber’s Journal asserted that Pathe was making a picture in the Gardens on that day. Pathe was queried. They replied, giving the date the picture was made—January 24, 1910. Nine years later.
But such a theory makes no attempt to explain the landscape the ladies had seen on that first visit, and which the evidence assembled through the years seems to prove conclusively was the landscape of 1789.
This evidence is mustered with painstaking care. For each smallest item a reference to some authority, frequently to several separate authorities, is given. There is not space here for a detailed examination of this evidence, but a number of points are so startling and significant that I feel they deserve inclusion.
One of the most interesting features is the story of the two maps. The only known map of the Trianon of 1789 was La Motte’s copy of Mique’s original. (Mique was landscape gardener for Marie Antoinette. He was guillotined in 1794.) By La Motte’s map some features of the landscape were not located at the points where the ladies remembered to have seen them. Apparently the descriptions of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain were incorrect. But in 1903 Mique’s original map was discovered—and it placed each of these features just where the ladies had seen them in 1901! La Motte’s map had been incorrect. (Mique’s original map was found thrust into the chimney of a house in Montmorency. It was uncovered when the chimney, of which it formed a part of the stuffing, was cleared.)
Besides this map, which depicted the bridge they had crossed and which authorities assured them had never existed—the two friends discovered, in 1908, protruding from a rock located within the area wherein they remembered the bridge to have been, two “peculiar projections”—which might have formed the supports for a small bridge.
Mique’s map also established the kiosk at the spot the ladies had encountered it, and they finally discovered in the French National Archives an estimate of the cost of such a kiosk, and the actual sum paid for its erection. Further, Miss Jourdain discovered in the Gardens a part of a broken column, half buried in a tree growing around it!
Then there was the mystery of what the two ladies call “the chapel man.” As they remembered it, and wrote of it in their records, he walked directly to them from a door in the chapel to the point at which they were standing on the terrace around the main building of the Little Trianon. As these buildings are related today, that would be impossible. To go from one to the other it would be necessary to descend a flight of steps, cross a lawn, and ascend a second flight of steps to the terrace.
But in 1910 the fact was established that there had at one time existed a covered passage from the house to the chapel. The roof of this passage had formed a terrace joining the terrace about the house to the small terrace outside the chapel door.
This chapel is today in a ruinous condition. The door used by the “chapel man” is reached from the inside only by a staircase which has been completely broken down since about 1885. In 1907 a guide told Miss Jourdain that the doors of the chapel had not been opened for fifteen years.
The “chapel man” was definitely conscious of the presence of the two ladies. He not only addressed them, and escorted them out to the drive, but also regarded them, they thought, inquisitively, and with amusement. At what was he amused? Their clothes? Their speech? Did he, perhaps, return to his chapel and tell of the two odd visitors to the Gardens, English by their accent, who spoke such a queer French, and wore such ridiculous clothing? Coming from a time more than a hundred years in the future, they must have seemed very strange to him. At any rate the man saw them.
The road leading to the drive along which the man had guided them is no longer existing. The point at which it joined the drive is now occupied by buildings, and if the ladies passed along this road in 1901 they walked through the solid walls of the twentieth century!
Mique’s map placed the road where they remembered it, and in 1910 they found signs of an old road on the walls and the base of the buildings which now occupy the spot.
The ladies had seen, at the start of their walk in 1901, a plow lying near some farm buildings. It seemed unlikely that a plow would be part of the equipment of the Gardens. There is none there at present. But listed in the catalogue of the Trianon sale after the King’s death is a plow. It was purchased by Louis XV, who had had lessons in plowing given to his grandson, the dauphin. And in a shop on the Quai des Grand Augustins the two investigators found an old engraving, which had never been reproduced, showing the dauphin—later Louis XVI—driving this plow. Was it the same plow which these two wanderers into another century had seen lying in the Gardens?
And so the evidence is marshaled, bit by bit. I have only briefly recounted what you may read for yourself in full in the book written by Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain. It is entitled “An Adventure,” and is well worth the attention of all possessed of an open mind. A preface by J. W. Dunne, the English physicist, discussed the theory of Serialism in relation to this adventure, and will be of interest to those equipped to follow this hypothesis of abstract and fourth dimensional Time.
In August, 1913, the two ladies walked through the grounds accompanied by two Frenchmen, one a distinguished scholar, the other a colonel of a French regiment who was an authority on the history of French uniforms. As far as the alterations permitted, they retraced the route taken in 1901.
The colonel had the ladies describe in detail the uniforms worn by the guards they had seen at the inception of their walk, and told them the description was perfectly correct for the year 1789. He also made the statement that it would have been almost impossible for them to have given this description unless they had seen these uniforms, for such information was very difficult of access, even for himself, an officer in the service.
These gentlemen checked each of the points of their story, and in many cases were able to explain the changes that had taken place, and the reason for them.
The actual pathway Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain had followed on their first visit to the Gardens had been destroyed, they learned, by Louis Philippe when he had had the ground in that vicinity leveled.
In 1908 Miss Jourdain again experienced, for the third and last time, what we may only describe as time-travel. It was on one of her many subsequent visits to the Trianon, and happened on the lane which had first led them both back into another century. In her own words, she “knew that some indefinable change had taken place.” She felt as though she “were being taken up into another condition of things quite as real as the former.” (That may be an actual eyewitness’ description of the experience of time-travel!) She glanced back to see the landscape of the present fading, and that of their original visit taking its place. Miss Jourdain continued as she had been going, and after leaving the lane the strangeness vanished. What if she had turned back—
One more point, which is no more than touched upon at the back of their book, seems to me pregnant with significance. In 1914 the two adventurers were visited by a family whose name is withheld. This family had lived in Versailles for two years, in 1907 and 1908. They, too, had inexplicable experiences in the Gardens of the Trianon—they found the topography and the light so frequently eerie and disturbing that it finally got on their nerves to such an extent that they departed.
This family had seen some of the landscape features described by Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain, and were able to locate them accurately on a map of the Gardens.
But, more than this, this family reported a “curious hissing sound —and a vibration in the air,” which to them suggested an electrical field. Upon hearing this, the authors of “An Adventure” referred to a
n almanac. They learned that August l0, 1901, was the date of an electric storm which had included the whole of Europe—
If you admit that these two ladies were not the victims of an hallucination, and not deliberate liars—and the evidence in their favor seems to me to surmount all objections—then a speculative vista lies before you in which no boundaries may be seen. I shall attempt no exploration here, but I would like to present one feature which might easily be overlooked.
How many others have made similar trips through time? Remember that Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain were intellectual women, they were careful and painstaking research workers, and above all, they were alert enough to record immediately a history of their unique experience.
Now place in their position another person, ignorant, or superstitious, or merely someone who feared ridicule, and knew that such a story coming from himself would provoke nothing else. Would that story ever have been recorded, or ever published?
Although no explanation for their experience, considering the evidence, has been offered, there is no reason to believe that it could not happen to anyone—to you, perhaps. The case of the family residing in Versailles during 1907 and 1908 is an example. Perhaps others, unknown, undistinguished, keeping their secret to themselves, have also traveled in time; further back, possibly, than the authors of “An Adventure,” even, it may be, into the future.
I wonder, too, why the Petit Trianon has not been the site and subject of experiments with time, in so far as the science of our day can investigate such matters; why have not the daring, who would venture into this undiscovered country of dimensional time, been drawn to it? By its record it is the pre-eminent site for such experiments, challenging the fearless.
Adventures in Time and Space Page 88
