Adventure

Two distinguished Oxford academics embark on what should be an ordinary afternoon at Versailles in 1901. Instead, they stumble into something inexplicable: figures from the eighteenth century, an atmosphere wrong in ways they cannot name, and the unmistakable presence of Marie Antoinette herself, alive in the gardens of the Petit Trianon. When Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain compare their notes afterward, the coincidences are too precise to dismiss. What follows is their meticulous, deeply strange account of what they experienced, and what they cannot explain. Published anonymously in 1911, the book caused an immediate sensation. Here were two serious scholars asserting they had witnessed the impossible, and the world did not know how to respond. The incident haunted both women for the rest of their lives. A century later, the mystery remains unresolved. This is a ghost story written by ghosts of another era, women caught between the rational certainty of Edwardian England and something their education had no language for.