On the weathered spine of an old book, two words are written in gold letters: “Adventure.” The place and time of publication are written on its first pages: London, 1911. In the preface, the narrative is in the first person plural, similar to a common confession heard by parasites a hundred years ago: “It was a great impudence to speak openly about personal experience, and we do this only for the following reasons. First, we prefer our history, which some people know in part, to be known to us in its entirety. Secondly, we have collected so much information on this issue that it is now possible to consider it in its entirety. Thirdly, conditions at Versailles are changing, and after a short time unknown details and unusual situations may soon become commonplace and lose their validity as evidence that some strange psychological states must have taken place either within us or within this place. .”

What happened at Versailles and what are these “strange circumstances” referring to?

This old book starts out as a mysterious old black and white movie and we’re left wondering what happens next. “It is not our business to explain or understand, and we do not pretend to understand what exactly happened to us that brought us into contact with so many true facts that nine years ago no one could have told us in their fullness. But in order for the public to be able to clearly judge all these circumstances, we tried to accurately and as simply and completely as possible record what happened.

A wax-like woman and a girl, a scary gagged man, and two-dimensional lifeless trees.

The text is signed with the initials “E.M.” and “F.L.” and the table of contents describes a mysterious case: “Three visits to the Petit Trianon”, “The result of the investigation”, “A dream come true”. In this 111-year-old English edition, strange phenomena are described in the gardens of Versailles by two English scientists whose real names (which they did not reveal until 1931) were Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte-Anne Mauberly. . Both daughters of clergymen and teachers at the Oxford Women’s College, they were two of the typical representatives of the intellectual women of Victorian England, who were nicknamed “bluestockings”.

When tourists from Paris arrived in Versailles on August 10, 1901, the palaces seemed boring to them, and they wanted to visit the Trianon estate, hoping to find something more interesting there. And in this private “pleasure garden” of the monarchs of pre-revolutionary France, a fabulous microcosm of lakes, sculptures and fountains, grottoes, wonderful open-air summer pavilions and a miniature traditional village, they found perhaps more interest than they had hoped.

In search of the “Little Trianon” (a neoclassical country house built in the late 18th century by Louis XI for his mistress, the Marquise de Pompadour, but associated with the infamous Marie Antoinette, wife of the next King Louis XVI), they got lost. and, like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole, they encountered a series of otherworldly faces and experienced evocative, otherworldly feelings in a dimension that seemed dreamlike yet otherworldly and menacing.

Ghosts or a crazy Frenchman?

First they crossed paths with two gardeners, whom they asked for directions. They looked, in their words, like “honorable officials, in long gray-green coats and cocked hats.” Clothes that they later learned belonged a century ago. Then they saw an old farmhouse with a woman and a girl standing at the door. They looked fake, “like wax figures” as they say. “Suddenly everything seemed unnatural, unpleasant. Even the trees seem to have become two-dimensional, lifeless, like a pattern on a fabric. There was no change of light and shadow, no wind blew between the branches,” they write in a tone reminiscent of the American horror master H. F. Lovecraft.

A little later, in the open pavilion, they encountered another strange character. He was wearing a cloak and a large hat, and his face was pitted with smallpox. When he turned sharply and looked at them, they felt an inexplicable horror in them. Then another man suddenly appeared, advising them not to go into the booth. “Ladies, you must not go this way,” he told them, pointing in the other direction. Following his advice, they finally arrived at the Petit Trianon, where they found a young woman in an old-fashioned summer dress. Soon a crowd of tourists brought them back to reality.

A few months later they decided to write about their brief but unforgettable encounter with the “ghosts of Trianon”. They assumed that the woman they found painting was Marie Antoinette, and that the terrifying man with the disfigured face was the Comte de Vaudreuil, a member of the court who had a love-hate relationship with the queen. They also noticed that the date of this day coincided with the date of the rebel invasion of the palace of Kerameikos, the residence of the king, and the fall of the monarchy. They speculated that they traveled back in time, perhaps by tuning in to Marie Antoinette’s memories shortly before her guillotine execution in 1793. This old book, with layouts reminiscent of Agatha Christie-style detective detective novels, has sold 11,000 copies. two years and gave the popular imagination one of the most popular ghost stories. A story that even reached American magazines such as Dime Mystery Magazine (1949), which featured an article titled “Adventures in the Unknown: The Haunted Trianon”, and World of Wonder Magazine (1970) with a question to readers: ” Did you see Marie Antoinette at Versailles in 1901? In fact, a feature film was made for British television in 1981 called The Haunting of Miss Morison.

Of course, there were revelations: some said that two conservative English academics had just stumbled upon some … crazy French people who were throwing an eccentric party in ancient costumes there (which was really the dandy poet Robert de Montesquieu, who lived nearby in the garden). Others said it was all an expression of the psychiatric phenomenon of “symbiotic psychosis” (“folie a deux”).

But there was also the French writer and historian René Allot – that brilliant intellectual of metaphysics – who presented in 1968 another, meaningful and pleasant interpretation, which not only stands next to the “visions” of two English women, but also ascribes to them sitting down the role of the protagonist and ” instigator” of the secret. As he wrote, “if two English tourists had seen nothing, they would not have sacrificed years of their lives trying to understand what they had experienced during an hour of walking, doing research that might have poisoned their reputation. At the same time, it must be remembered that the garden of the Petit Trianon is not like the other gardens of Versailles. It is a “fairy” garden, to use Morel’s expression in his 1776 Theory of Gardens. The reason for the hallucinations of the two English women was, in my opinion, the vague charm of that unknown territory into which they first entered, on August 10, 1901.