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The Trianon Adventure
GIBBONS, A.O. (Ed.). The Trianon Adventure: A Symposium. London: Museum Press Limited, 1958.
First edition. Scarce in the evocative dust jacket.
On a visit to Versailles in the summer of 1901, Charlotte Moberly (1846–1937), the first principal of St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, and Eleanor Jourdain (1863–1924), the school’s vice-principal, shared an experience that gave rise to one of the best-known of all ghost stories, when they saw what they later surmised to be the ghost of Marie Antoinette.
A decade later in 1911 the two women published An Adventure, their account of how on their visit to the Petit Trianon they both experienced the landscape and buildings as they had been in 1789, and encountered the ghosts of Marie Antoinette and members of her court.
The book created a sensation, and it remained in print for most of the 20th century, attracting a number of critical works, including the present book, whose contributors tend to support, in the main, the original stories of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain.
106 pp; b/w photos, 1 folding plate. 8vo, original cloth, spine faded; partial browning to endpapers. Very good in very good dust jacket (slight edge-wear; price-clipped; some fading/browning to spine.