The Ghosts of the Trianon
by C. A. E. Moberly and E. F. Jourdain
Edited by Michael H. Coleman
Copyright © 1988 by Dr. Michael Coleman

Later Reactions

In his other book, The Directory of Possibilities, written with John Grant, Wilson repeats his previous account of the Versailles case (pp. 116-18) under the entry 'Time Slip'. Victoria Branden in her book Understanding Ghosts, gives a very brief reference (pp. 33-4) to the Trianon story, identifying the authors as 'school-teachers' and supposing them to be 'steeped in the history, literature and art of the period'. She supposes that the ladies were subject to hypnogogic imagery, perhaps shared telepathically between them.

In Visions, Apparitions, and Alien Visitors, Hilary Evans refers briefly to An Adventure, which he describes as being published anonymously (really pseudonymously), before giving a very succinct statement of the case. He questions whether the ladies traveled back in time, or if the past came forward to meet them. He suggests that the second is the more popular explanation, and that it argues for the existence, somewhere, of a record of the events witnessed. From this he suggests that the experience must have been —at least in part—a physical event.

As a tireless advocate of the marvellous, Brian Inglis had already referred to An Adventure in the first of his works concerned with psychical research, Natural and Supernatural (p. 436, wrongly indexed as p. 430), in which he speaks of the controversy over the story as grumbling on ever since. In two of his more recent books, The Paranormal and The Hidden Power, he returns to the story at greater length. In the first of these, in a chapter entitled 'Retrocognition', he summarizes (pp. 88-9) the ladies' experiences in just a sentence and refers to Mrs Sidgwick's (misleadingly described as wife of the founder of the SPR) critical review as 'sniffy'. He then refers to the explanation of the story in terms of Montesquiou's fancy dress party, but claims that Andrew MacKenzie had adduced evidence unconsidered by Mrs Sidgwick and had exploded the Montesquiou explanation on the grounds that the Count was living 'elsewhere at the time'. (In fact the time did not refer to 1901, the date of the adventure, and 'elsewhere' was only in Paris, a short distance away.) Inglis then claims that the case was actually stronger than that envisaged by the authors, because of the emergence of details (really those collected by G.W. Lambert, whom he does not name) connecting their experiences with 1770 rather than 1789 which they had favoured. In the second work referred to, Inglis is principally concerned with discrediting the Montesquiou explanation of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain's adventure (he inappropriately describes them as 'two Oxford dons'). He argues that Joan Evans, as a staunch rationalist, was anxious to find a naturalistic explanation of the visions of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain, whom she greatly admired. Inglis contends that she seized on Montesquiou's fancy dress parties as providing such an explanation without the need to impugn the ladies' integrity, but she did not verify that such a party had been held on the fateful date, 10 August 1901, because she had no wish to undermine an explanation which satisfied both her own rationalistic beliefs and upheld the ladies' integrity. He goes on to claim that 'inspection of the appropriate records' revealed that Montesquiou had not been giving his parties in August 1901. (The only doubt raised against this explanation is that engendered by MacKenzie's report that Montesquiou was not living in Versailles in 1896, which is hardly conclusive. (It is noticeable that Inglis only refers to 'parties'—for which some record might be supposed to have survived—and not the dress-rehearsal for a tableau vivant to which Joan Evans refers, and which would probably go unrecorded.)