Everything You Should Know About The Moberly-Jourdain Incident

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A century ago, a Versailles time traveling incident made headlines around the world. Two academics named Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain experienced a strange event on a casual stroll through the gardens of Versailles in 1901. The women spent the next decade researching every detail from their trip, finally concluding that they experienced a time slip. Since then, many have seen Moberly and Jourdain as real-life time travelers.

Moberly and Jourdain's book, republished as An Adventure: A True Story About Time Travel, recounts every detail of the incident, supported by exhaustive research into the clothing, layout, and people at Versailles in 1789. Some of the details they recall simply don't appear in most history books. And with all the fantastic stories about Versailles, it's not hard to imagine mysterious things still might occur at the palace.

Genevieve Carlton

A Stroll In The Versailles Gardens Turned Eerie

On August 10, 1901, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain went for a walk in the gardens of Versailles. As they strolled, the two women went down an empty lane, searching for the Petit Trianon and Marie Antoinette's Hamlet. When the two found themselves lost in the woods, they asked a pair of gardeners for directions. They walked past a woman and girl in a cottage, a pair of guards wearing capes, and a man at a pavilion. They spoke to a gentleman with a strange accent and were scolded away from a chapel.


Photo: Jean-Eugène Durand/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

The winding path took Moberly and Jourdain over a rustic bridge and through an arbor, then across a meadow with long grass. Finally, they reached a lady sitting on a terrace sketching. The entire walk struck both women as completely ordinary, yet also eerie. Moberly wrote that "the stillness and oppressiveness were so unnatural." It was almost as though "we were walking in a dream." It was only later the women wondered if they had slipped through time.