Please note that I edited the extract.

The introduction of this book starts like this:

<< On the afternoon of 10 August 1901 two Englishwomen on a visit to the palace of Versailles had an extraordinary experience - they stepped back in time. The incredible happened as they walked alomg a shaded lane on their way to the Petit Trianon, the small secluded eighteenth century mansion that had once been the private retreat of Queen Marie-Antoinette. The features of the garden, the buildings, even the people they met, obviously belonged to a time much earlier than 1901.

For Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, this was their first visit to Versailles [...] They had missed the direct way to the Petit Trianon, and turned down a sunken lane that led past the buildings of a domestic sort. Gradually, they were overcome by an accountable depression, 'as if something were wrong', Eleanor Jourdain recalled. [...]

The two women passed a stone cottage where Miss Jourdain noticed a woman handing a jug to a young girl. The old-fashioned dress struck her as odd. Then they asked the way of two ditinguished looking men carrying staffs and wearing long, greenish-grey coats and three-cornered hats. The men were standing near some gardening tools that included a wheelbarrow and a plough, and though the two women assumed they were gardeners, their dignified bearing suggested they were persons of authority. They directed the woman on toward a wood where the two saw a circular kiosk, something like a small bandstand. On the steps sat a man wearing a heavy black cloak around his shoulders and a slouch hat. 'At that moment', Miss Jourdain later wrote, 'the eerie feeling that had begun in the garden culminated in a definite impression of something uncanny and fear-inspring.' [...]

When the man turned his head they could see that his face was dark and disfigured by smallpox. His expression struck them both as 'very evil and yet unseeing', and though he did not seem to be looking at them, neither of them wanted to step any colser to him. While they were hesitating, they heard the sound of running footsteps along a nearby path. The rocks separating the paths concealed the runner from their view, until suddenly he was behind them and quite close. This man also wore a thick cloak and large hat, though only afterward did the two wonder at such odd clothes for a hot August afternoon. He was handosme, 'distinctly a gentleman', and he called out to them in an excited manner and in oddly-pronounce dFrench that they were not to go toward the kiosk but to the Petit Trianon. Curiosly, he referred to it as 'la maison', the word used by Marie-Antoinette to describe her palace.

The two tourists crossed a small rustic bridge over a tiny ravine and came out into an English landscape garden, that at last gave them a sight of the Petit Trianon. The windows were shuttered, but on the terrace sat a middle-aged woman wearing a light summer dress and a large white hat over her fair hair. She was sketching the trees. They could see no way of entering the building on this side, so they walked around the west corner onto a terrace looking down on the formal beds of the French garden. All but one of the windows were shuttered, but from a door in what seemed to be a separate house beyond the Petit Trianon itself, a man with the jaunty air of a footman emerged, banging the door behind him. He told them that the way to 'la maison' lay through the courtyard on the other sied of the kitchen and he offered to show them the way. 'He looked inquisitively amused as he walked by us down the French garden', said Miss Moberly. When he left them, they at last made their way into the Petit Trianon and followed a merry French wedding party around the rooms. Both felt lively and normal again.

Letr they dicovered that only Miss Moberly had seen the lady sketching and only Miss Jourdain had seem the cottage woman and the child. Neither of them could understand how the other had failed to see people so close. This discrepancy set them thinking that they must have glimpsed some sort of apparition, so they wrote down separate accounts of that afternoon in Versailles. Both were keen observbers with skill in expressing themselves. Miss Moberly, elder of the two, had been for fifteen years principal of St. Hugh's Hall (later College) at Oxford University; Miss Jourdain, later to be her successor at St. Hugh's, was in 1901, headmistress of a successful private school outside London.

[...] she [Miss Jourdain] and Miss Moberly subsequently went again together [to Versailles]. To their astonishment, derelict gates, unopened for many years, blocked the paths they had followed in 1901. No stone cottage existed, no kiosk; neither the little bridge nor the ravine it crossed could be found. In place of the rough and shaded meadow of the English garden, they saw a broad gravel sweep leading up to a terrace, and where the woman had set sketching, they found large rhododendron bushes of many years growth. Besides these changes in the surroundings, they found numerous groups of visitors an all sides where previously they had been unpleasantly aware of being alone in that part of the garden. [...]

The discovery that tehre had been an alteration of the very scenery of the place gave an altogether more remarkable quality to their experience. They had not merely seen ghosts from the past, but in some unknown way they had entered a past where those 'ghosts' were still living people and the scenery that of their own earlier time.

The two women [...] discovered that the door through which the footman had come to show them the way had been locked for many years, and the passages and the stairways behind the door were all broken and unusable. When they asked an official about the green coats wore by the gardeners, they were told that green had been one of the colours of the long-vanished royal livery. No plough of the kind Miss Jourdain had seen was any longer in use at the Petit Trianon, but throughout the reign of King Louis XVI and Marie- Antoinette, an old plough had been preserved there. [...] The discovery of long-forgotten maps and paintings of the gardens confirmed the existence in the eightheenth century of many features seen by Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain on 10 August 1901 - but long since swept away in the aftermath of the French Revolution.

[...] In 1911 they [Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain] published a record of their experience and seubsequent research, calling the book An Adventure. [...]

Suggestions that the two toursits had interrupted a group of people rehearsing a play or making a film had been investigated at the start and proved unfounded. In The Trianon Adventure, the principal author, Arnold O. Gibbons, has suggested the existence of some power, at present unknown, that enables an image of reality as it once existed to become available again to a living brain. [...] >>