Time slips: what happened to the Versailles story between editions

A time slip is a report of finding oneself briefly in an earlier period — buildings, clothing, vehicles and people belonging to a past era, followed by an abrupt return to the present.

The foundational case, and still the most examined, is the Moberly-Jourdain incident.

The account

On 10 August 1901, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain — respectively the principal and a future principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford — were walking in the grounds of the Petit Trianon at Versailles.

They described an oppressive atmosphere, and encountering people in eighteenth-century dress, including a woman sketching whom they later came to believe was Marie Antoinette.

They published the account in 1911 as An Adventure, under pseudonyms. Both were serious academics and neither was a professional occultist, which is why the case has been taken seriously for over a century.

What the manuscripts show

This is the decisive part and it comes from their own papers.

The account was written up some months after the event and revised repeatedly across editions. Comparison of the successive versions shows the story acquiring detail over time — specific figures, specific clothing, specific identifications that were not in the earliest written versions.

Some of the added detail followed their own subsequent historical research into the Trianon, which they undertook precisely in order to identify what they had seen.

The mundane explanation

The most persistent is that they encountered a rehearsal. The Comte Robert de Montesquiou hosted elaborate costumed tableaux at the Trianon in this period, and people in period dress in those grounds were not extraordinary.

Two English academics unfamiliar with the estate, walking in an unusual part of the grounds on a hot afternoon, encountering costumed figures, is a sufficient account of the original experience — before the years of revision.

What happened to the two women afterwards

The aftermath is part of the evidence and is usually omitted.

Moberly and Jourdain returned to Versailles repeatedly and conducted extensive archival research into the layout of the grounds in the eighteenth century, trying to establish what they had seen.

They found features they believed corresponded to their account — a bridge, a kiosk — and incorporated them into later editions. Critics identified errors in that research and argued the features had been misidentified.

The other cases

Bold Street in Liverpool has produced a cluster of reports since the 1990s, most famously one from 1996 in which a man described stepping into a street of 1950s shopfronts and vehicles.

These are single-witness, retrospective, and in a city centre where period architecture, film shoots and vintage events are all ordinary.