The Trianon Adventure
GIBBONS, A.O. (Ed.). The Trianon Adventure: A Symposium. London: Museum Press Limited, 1958.
First edition.
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.
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. In 1911, in an effort to “help the science of the future”, Moberly and Jourdain 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 late 18th-century 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. The book includes the written narratives of the ghost stories which form the true core of An Adventure, reproduced here from the original manuscripts at the Bodleian Library.