Retrocognition – or Time Travel?

A time travel story to start the new year:

In 1911, a book called An Adventure was published by Anne Moberly, an English schoolmistress, and Eleanor Jourdain, about an experience they’d had a decade earlier at Versailles, a palace near Paris that was once the home of French kings.

It was the summer of 1901 and the two women traveled to Paris for two weeks of sightseeing in and  around the city. On August 10,  they traveled to Versailles by train for two weeks of sightseeing. It was Moberly’s first trip to Paris and Jourdain’s second. At the time, Moberly was head of a women’s residential hall at Oxford University and Jourdain was considering a job as her assistant. The women felt the trip would allow them to get to know each other.

In Versailles, they toured the palace and then decided to walk to the Petit Trianon, once home to Marie Antoinette. The Petite Trianon and its park are indelibly linked to the memory of Antoinette.  According to the Versailles website: “She is the only queen to have imposed her personal taste on Versailles. Sweeping away the old court and its traditions, she insisted on living as she wished. In her Trianon domain, which Louis XVI gave her in 1774, she found the heaven of privacy that enabled her to escape from the rigours of court etiquette. Nobody could come there without her invitation.”

The day was breezy for August and the two women set out and strolled through the tremendous formal garden and then headed into a wooded area. They had a guidebook with them, but even so, when they emerged from the woods,  they found themselves at the wrong building – the Grand Trianon. After consulting their guidebook again, they started up a path that appeared to lead to the Petit Trianon. Moberly noticed a woman shaking a cloth from the window of a building they passed, but didn’t stop to ask for directions.

The grounds were curiously empty of tourists, but the women came upon two somber-looking men  in green coats and three-cornered hats. They appeared to be gardeners; a wheelbarrow and spade were nearby. Jourdain, who spoke French, asked which path led to the Petit Trianon and the men answered.  But their reply was so mechanical that Jourdain repeated her question and received the same answer.

A woman and girl were standing in the doorway or a nearby cottage and Jourdain noticed  their old-fashioned clothes. She didn’t say anything to Moberly and they continued along the path the men had indicated.

At this point, Moberly suddenly felt deeply depressed and her depression increased by the moment. She didn’t say anything to Jourdain,  who was experiencing a profound sense of loneliness and felt like she was sleepwalking. She didn’t say anything about how she was feeling, either.  They followed the path until it intersected yet another path. Directly ahead of them, in the shadows of a dense wooded area, stood a kiosk, where a cloaked man was seated.

Oddly, it was no longer breezy and the air felt strangely ominous and claustrophobic. Moberly later wrote that everything around her “suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees  behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.”

The man looked at the women but Jourdain felt he wasn’t really looking at them. Moberly felt the man’s face was repulsive, odious. They hurried on and eventually caught sight of the Petit Trianon. Moberly thought it looked more like an elegant country house rather than a royal establishment.  Near a terrace that wrapped around the house, Moberly saw a woman who appeared to be sketching.  She wore old-fashioned clothes – a broad-brimmed white hat and a low-cut dress with a full skirt.

They reached the terrace  and made their way around the courtyard and into a French wedding party – where everyone was dressed in 20^th century clothing. Their somber moods and the oppressive feeling in the air dissipated.

The two women didn’t discuss their experience until a week later, when Moberly asked Jourdain if she thought the Petit Trianon was haunted. She said she did think it was haunted. Once they began discussing their experiences, they were shocked to discover that Jourdain hadn’t seen the seated woman sketching in the garden. Even more startling was their discovery that August 10, the day they had visited, was a pivotal date in French history – on that day in 1792, revolutionary forces had arrested the royal family. That arrest was the beginning of the end for Marie Antoinette. This could explain the feelings of depression and oppression both women experienced.

They later wrote up their individual accounts of the experience and uncovered other discrepancies about what each of them had seen or not seen. They tracked down dozens of documents, including a map drawn by the queen’s architect that suggested a cottage had stood where Jourdain had seen one.  An architectural record from 1780 noted a small columned structure that the women though might have been the kiosk they’d seen.

In 1965, psychic researcher G.W. Lambert proposed that the two women had a genuine experience with retrocognition – backward knowing – but got the dates wrong. His research suggested they saw events from 1770 instead of 1789. A biographer, Philippe Julian, discovered that a flamboyant poet and his friends often rehearsed historical plays near the Petit Trianon and concluded the women had stumbled into one of these rehearsals.

The women willed the book’s copyright to to Dame Joan Evans, an art historian who believed Julian’s theory. She refused to authorize any more English editions of An Adeventure.

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This story has fascinated me ever since I first read it as a kid. Then, as now, it seems to be that the women actually walked back in time.