Petit Trianon

The story

The Petit Trianon is a small château in the park of Versailles, built between 1762 and 1768 by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV. In 1774 Louis XVI gave the domain to Marie-Antoinette, and between roughly 1777 and 1782 Richard Mique laid out the English garden and its ornamental buildings (the dating of the hamlet is less firm). The queen left the Trianon on 5 October 1789, the date restorers still use as their reference point, and the furniture was sold at auction in 1793 and 1794.

The house then passed through other hands. It was made available to Napoleon's sister Pauline Borghese and later used by Empress Marie-Louise. Under the July Monarchy it became first a museum and then, from 1837, the home of the duc and duchesse d'Orléans; the duchess stayed on after her husband's accidental death in 1842 and found the place sad. We found no ghost story tied to her. In 1867 Empress Eugénie arranged a retrospective homage to Marie-Antoinette, after which the house became a museum devoted to the queen.

The Trianon's ghost reputation rests mainly on a single afternoon. On Saturday 10 August 1901, Charlotte Anne Moberly (1846-1937), principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, and Eleanor Jourdain (1863-1924), her vice-principal, lost their way while looking for the Petit Trianon. The date is given by Tom Ruffles's review for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) and by the book: Moberly's narrative opens “on an August afternoon, 1901”, and Jourdain writes that they were there on the anniversary of 10 August.

The legend

According to their later account, the two women met a series of figures that did not belong to the present. They described two men in long grey-green coats and small three-cornered hats, whom they took for officials. Moberly alone saw a woman sitting on the grass beneath a terrace, holding a sheet of paper at arm's length, in a white hat and kerchief; Jourdain did not see her. Both noticed a dark-skinned man in a cloak near a kiosk, his face marked by smallpox. A man in a cloak ran up and told them to look for the house. They also mention a young servant coming out of a door and a bridge they could not find again, all under a growing sense of oppression and unreality. The outing ended behind a French wedding party touring the house, whom the book says they took for real people. Moberly later connected the seated woman with a portrait of Marie-Antoinette by Wertmüller, and the authors linked the pockmarked man with the comte de Vaudreuil. The authors read the episode as a memory of the queen, tied to 5 October 1789 or to 10 August 1792, the day the Tuileries fell. We found no other witness to the 1901 events.

The oldest dated trace is the set of written accounts the two women said they made in November 1901, dated 25 and 28 November in the book's appendix. According to the book, Moberly had asked Jourdain about a week after the visit whether the Trianon was haunted, and they returned to the subject on 10 November 1901. Moberly's claim that longer versions followed in December 1901 is contested, as Ruffles reports. Jourdain went back alone on 2 January 1902, and the pair returned on 4 and 9 July 1904. They sent accounts to the SPR in October 1902, and the society judged the material too thin to investigate. The 1913 appendix says the manuscripts of the first pair still existed, while the longer versions were copied into a manuscript book in 1906 and then destroyed; Ruffles writes that the original documents were destroyed. W. H. Salter's 1950 critique, which we know only through hoaxes.org, argues that several details attributed to 1901 were added around 1906, after historical research, which undercuts the claim that the women could not have known the Versailles of 1789. We searched the full text of the 1913 edition and read key passages, not the whole book.

The book, An Adventure, appeared in 1911 under the pseudonyms “Elizabeth Morison” and “Frances Lamont”. Macmillan had asked the SPR for an opinion beforehand, and the researcher Alice Johnson met Moberly without reaching agreement. Eleanor Sidgwick's 1911 SPR review put the experience down to heat, fatigue and memories altered by late writing. Reprints followed in 1913 (hoaxes.org gives 11,000 copies sold), 1924, 1931, 1955 and 1988. The authors' identities were revealed in 1931 according to English Wikipedia, while hoaxes.org and French Wikipedia say only after the women's deaths (1924 and 1937); the sources conflict and we have not settled it. Moberly died on 6 May 1937 (French Wikipedia says 7 May), and her papers are in the Bodleian Library.

The explanation cited most often comes from Philippe Jullian's 1964 biography of Robert de Montesquiou (some sources say 1965), which suggests the women met costumed walkers from the poet's garden tableaux. According to Skeptoid, Joan Evans, Jourdain's literary executor, adopted the idea in 1976 but found no record of such an event in 1901, so it remains plausible and unproven. We did not read Jullian or Evans. Mark Lamont's 2016 book, as analysed by Ruffles, finds that later accounts are not independent and contain eighteenth-century elements. French Wikipedia records the objection that nobody else left a written report of anachronistically dressed strollers. We found no evidence of deliberate fraud; most critics we read see a sincere experience that was embellished in the retelling. Some unsourced claims circulate, such as a 2013 assertion about plans for a Chinese pavilion in the Versailles library, which we could not verify.

The story kept finding new audiences: a 1959 French edition, Les Fantômes du Trianon, with a preface by Jean Cocteau; an episode of the ORTF series Le Tribunal de l'impossible on 10 February 1968; the 1981 television film Miss Morison's Ghosts; and BBC radio adaptations in 2004 and 2015. Our search of American newspapers from 1770 to 1963 found nothing on the 1901 affair, but it did find a separate story. In autumn 1920 several papers reported a ghost of Marie-Antoinette in the park: the Great Falls Daily Tribune (4 October) said royalist families at Versailles swore she haunted the hamlet, and the New York Herald (17 October) ran “A Ghost for Tourists”, with locals telling tales for tips about a boarded-up dairy. We found no dated Trianon ghost story older than 1901. The book does say that in November 1901 a French friend told Jourdain of a tradition among friends at Versailles that the queen is seen there on a certain day in August, but that rests on the authors' word alone.

What remains today

The Petit Trianon still stands in the park of Versailles. Since 2010 the Marie-Antoinette estate (the small château, gardens and hamlet) has been presented as one group. A south-west attic bedroom has been arranged since 2008 as a reminder of the duchesse d'Orléans's boudoir. A fire in February 2019 and a partial closure are reported; we could not confirm the present state of those areas.

Visiting

The domain is a public, ticketed part of the Versailles estate. We could not confirm opening hours, so check the official Château de Versailles website before you plan a trip. We found no source describing a ghost tour or any marker for the spots in the 1901 account.

Sources

1. Le petit Trianon : architecture, décoration, ameublement — Württemberg State Library via Europeana, 1908 · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
2. Le Petit-Trianon : histoire et description — Internet Archive · Desjardins, Gustave Adolphe 1834-1902, 1885-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
3. The Petit Trianon, being a reproduction of plates from a work — Internet Archive · Arnott, James Alexander, 1914-01-01 · Public domain (pre-1929)
4. Wikimedia Commons category : Petit Trianon — Wikimedia Commons
5. An Adventure (Moberly-Jourdain incident) — Wikipedia (en)
6. An Adventure (with appendix and maps), 1913 edition — Internet Archive, 1913
7. Bloementuin van het Petit Trianon — Rijksmuseum via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
8. Charlotte Anne Moberly — Wikipedia (en)
9. Domaine national ; Château, Petit Trianon — Media Library of Architecture and Heritage via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
10. Fantômes du Trianon — Wikipédia (fr)
11. La ferme au Petit Trianon, jardin : [dessin] — National Library of France via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-OKLR/1.0/
12. National domain; Castle, Petit Trianon — Media Library of Architecture and Heritage via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
13. Official website
14. Paris, Petit Trianon — Rijksmuseum via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
15. Petit Trianon — Wikipédia (fr)
16. Petit Trianon — German Documentation Center for Art History - Marburg Picture Index via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
17. Petit Trianon. — Collectie Herman Maes via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
18. Petit Trianon in de tuinen van het Paleis van Versailles — Rijksmuseum via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
19. Petit Trianon : [photographie] / [Atget] — National Library of France via Europeana · http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-OKLR/1.0/
20. Review of Mark Lamont's book on the Moberly-Jourdain case — Society for Psychical Research (Tom Ruffles)
21. The Petit Trianon — hoaxes.org
22. The Versailles Time Slip (Skeptoid #296) — Skeptoid (Brian Dunning), 2012-02-07
23. Versailles, Petit Trianon la laiterie — Central Library of Zurich via Europeana · http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
24. Wikipedia article — Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Text written by AI from the sources above and checked by a separate AI fact-check (how we work). Images: credits and licenses under each picture.