We are very busy people, and have refused to let the incident take a prominent place in our time, interests, or fancy, though from the first we agreed to lose no given opportunity of elucidation. The evidence has, therefore, come slowly; but the manner in which it has come has often been a source of surprise. If a helpful person came in our way, we showed the whole thing: if we were casually asked if certain reports were true, we confirmed them (when we could), but said nothing further. We were anxious to wait until we had exhausted every possible means of satisfying ourselves as to the exact amount of interest attaching to the story; and it was several years before we had to believe that we had seen the place as it had been a hundred years before, and as it had not been, in several important particulars, since 1835. The research had been undertaken with the idea of disproving the suggestion that anything unusual had happened, for we were resolved not to deceive ourselves or anyone else, if personal industry could prevent it.
9. In the course of the last four or five years, Miss Lamont has searched for evidence bearing on the story (either by word or picture) in the Archives nationales, in the library, museum, Mairie, and Archives departmentales at Versailles: also in the libraries Nationale, Hôtel de Ville, and in the Musée Carnavalet, and in the Conservatoire de Musique at Paris. She has poked about in French book and print shops, and must have seen a large number of the originals of the published plans, illustrations, and accounts of the place. We believe that there is not likely to be any striking documentary evidence other than we have dealt with.
10. The historical interest of the story seems to depend on the truth of the tradition that the Queen went to Trianon on October 5th, 1789. We can find no negative evidence of this, but extremely little which is both affirmative and trustworthy. Madame Campan’s short statement remains the basis of other people’s longer and more detailed narratives. General La Fayette’s full account of the day was burned by his wife during the Terror. Count Fersen’s memoirs were also partly destroyed. The Abbé Bossuet had Madame de Tourzel’s careful history of that day burned; but in the published memoirs she says that she was in residence that day at Versailles, as Gouvernante des enfants de France; she does not mention having gone to Trianon, as implied by Marion’s story, but it is still possible. Most French historians now adopt Madame Campan’s statement, but (in the words of one of them) “with some doubts.” It is worth mentioning that many later historians insert the fact (though it is not recorded by Madame Campan) that “the Queen was accompanied by a single valet.” Is this a tradition?
11. We do not believe in anniversaries in the usual sense. We have tested both our days (August 10th and January 2nd), going, as far as possible, under the same circumstances, without any result at the Petit Trianon. Yet it is possible that if we entered into an act of memory, it may well have been first made on the terrible 10th of August, 1792, though the memory itself was occupied (in the central place) with the events of October 5th, 1789. The dress of the messenger was more suitable for October than August. At the same time Vaudreuil left France the previous summer and cannot have sat in the Trianon woods after the taking of the Bastille, July 14th, 1789.
There is an incoherence about both the large and small incidents which seems to require combination within a single mind, and the only mind to which they could all have been present would have been that of the Queen. Our theory of 1901, that we had entered within the working of the Queen’s memory when she was still alive, is now enlarged. We think that the two first visits to Trianon (August 10th, 1901, and January 2nd, 1902) were part of one and the same experience; that quite mechanically we must have seen it as it appeared to her more than a hundred years ago, and have heard sounds familiar, and even something of words spoken, to her then.
Having been for two most trying years confined to Paris, and (excepting for a visit to St. Cloud) through two hot summers, and being in the midst of the tumultuous horrors of the great tenth of August, she may, as the day wore on, and she grew more used to her miserable position in the Hall of the Assembly—where she sat for eighteen hours—have fancied (in memory) the grounds at Trianon more spacious than they really were; and have seen the trees, as one sees trees in recollection, like a picture without life, depth, or movement. In rêverie her mind may have wandered from the familiar sight of the two Bersys at the gate, to the little vision of two men gathering up garden rubbish into a cart (which we know happened on October 5th, 1789, as well as one day during the last winter she spent at Versailles), and which—without any reason—had remained in her mind. She may have thought of the place as it was during that year of the meeting of the States-General when the grounds were, for the first time, thrown completely open to the public, and intruding strangers could be seen there. Or she may have gone back to the earlier years and the pleasant afternoons when the band played on the pelouse in front of the house, and to the excitement of acting in the little theatre with her special friends, perhaps letting herself realise the unkindness of the pressure put upon her by Vaudreuil to have the acting of the Mariage de Figaro authorised.
How naturally the thought of him would have formed one picture in her mind with the memory of the last scene, when she was hurriedly summoned from Trianon, never to return! For she may very likely have supposed all that she was suffering to have been more exclusively the result of her own former mistakes than could have been just, and have been going over them in her mind.
On our return to Paris on the day of the original visit to Trianon, when undoubtedly her image was uppermost in our thoughts, and the recollection of her terrible end was hardly to be endured, the recurring consolation to Miss Morison was, “She has forgiven it all now, and knows the true meaning of the French Revolution on both its good and bad sides, and also the exact proportion of her own part in it.” But the act of memory which had so strangely and mechanically clung to the place, with which we had, perhaps, been associated in the grounds, was incoherent and pictorial. It was oppressive to us because it represented a more limited view of those times than after a hundred years we have learnt to take of them, and was far more limited than any thought the Queen can have about them now.
12. Our answer to the suggestion that we were in a state of suspended consciousness is that our conversation and sense of the quiet continuity of things remained unbroken, and, in spite of oppression, believed ourselves to be particularly wide awake and on the alert. When we were first asked whether the man from the side building was real or not, we laughed at the idea of any unreality; all was so quietly natural that we are still uncertain whether the tall gardener belonged to another century or not. It has taken us nine years to work out all the details which bear witness to the strangeness of what we saw and did, and to justify us in our present conviction, that from the moment of our leaving the lane until we emerged into the avenue we were on enchanted ground.
13. The theory of coincidences would have to be considerably strained to cover more than twenty points quickly succeeding one another.