True or not, it makes for a rollicking good story: An Adventure, by C.A.E. Moberly

"Do you think the Petit Trianon is haunted?"

                      -- 11

9781330900031
Forgotten Books, 2018
originally published 1911
212 pp

paperback

In August 1901, two women visiting Versailles decided they'd visit the Petit Trianon.  Baedeker in hand, Miss Charlotte Anne Elizabeth Moberly and Miss Eleanor Frances Jourdain set off from the Salle des Glaces toward their destination, and what happened next became the subject of this book.   It also sparked a controversy that continued over the decades, a number of books, radio and television dramatizations, and as Wikipedia quotes historian Roy Strong, the incident  "retained its hold on the public imagination for half a century."  Even now, a full century-plus later, all manner of websites exist on the topic of what came to be known as the "Moberly-Jourdain Incident," so obviously some people are still interested.

The two women (who go by the pseudonyms of Morison and Lamont in this book)  set out on what Miss Moberly/Morison described as "a most enjoyable walk."  They passed the Grand Trianon which was on their left,

"and came up a broad green drive perfectly deserted. If we had followed it we should have come immediately to the Petit Trianon, but not knowing its position, we crossed the drive and went up a lane in front of us."

Evidently Miss Moberly was surprised that Miss Jourdain/Lamont didn't stop to ask directions from a "woman who was shaking a white cloth out of a window of a building at the corner of the lane," but they continued on their way, and eventually came to a point where "there were three paths" in front of them.  They followed the center path, since there were two men there from whom they thought they might get directions.  The men were dressed "in longish green coats with small three-cornered hats," and indeed directed them to continue straight. When they left the lane,  Miss Moberly reports an "extraordinary depression" that had come over her that she could not shake. Coming to a small garden kiosk, they encountered a man who looked at them, causing Miss Moberly to note that this was the "culmination" of her "peculiar sensations," and that she "felt a moment of genuine alarm."  Without giving away all of the strange occurrences reported by these women, they encountered yet another man who let them know that they were going the wrong way, and eventually they arrived at a house they had assumed was the Petit Trianon.  And if things weren't already weird enough for these two women, they become even more bizarre at this point, when Miss Moberly encounters a woman sketching.

On returning to Paris, an entire week elapsed before their strange afternoon came up in conversation.  Miss Moberly, who was writing a "descriptive letter" about their "expeditions of the week before," notes that the "scenes came back one by one," and she was once again plagued by the "same sensation of dreamy unnatural oppression."  At that point she turned to her friend and asked her if she believed that the Petit Trianon was haunted, to which Miss Jourdain instantly replied "Yes, I do."  They talked about it for a while, then the matter was dropped until some three months later, when Miss Jourdain reveals something to Miss Moberly about that day that prompted the latter to write that "we had a new element of mystery," and that the two women

"resolved to write down independent accounts of our expedition to Trianon, read up its history, and make every enquiry about the place." 

They each wrote out their accounts independently, and spent the next few years trying to find evidence for what they'd witnessed.  Miss Jourdain reveals in her account her discovery that August 10th, the day that they had been at Versailles, "had a great significance in French history...":

"On August 10th, 1792, the Tuileries was sacked.  The royal family escaped in the early morning to the Hall of the Assembly, where they were penned up for many hours hearing themselves practically dethroned, and within sound of the massacre of their servants and of the Swiss guards at the Tuileries."

She also reveals that both of the women wondered if they had "inadvertently entered within an act of the Queen's memory when alive..."

 In 1911, the two women published this book, which includes their accounts, their research over the ten years that had elapsed since their initial experiences, and it is here that the authors also attempt to offer proof that what they had encountered could have only taken place in the late eighteenth century.  They claim to have had no previous knowledge of Versailles in the eighteenth century prior to 1901, making it impossible to have come up with the detailed descriptions given in their respective accounts. Noting that they do not "pretend to understand -- what happened to put us into communication with so many true facts,"  they go on to say that the book was meant to "record exactly what happened as simply and fully as possible."

Whether or not you believe their account after reading this book, it does make for a rollicking good story. It obviously held great appeal for contemporary readers; Mark Lamont who investigated this case and published his findings in his The Mysterious Paths of Versailles (Book Venture Publishing, 2018), says that it was popular enough to merit a second printing the same year it was released. (69)  And speaking of Lamont's book, anyone planning to read An Adventure or who is even remotely interested in the experiences of these two women really ought to have Mysterious Paths of Versailles on hand as a companion read.  Lamont not only combs through their accounts, but piece by piece examines their evidence, and examines various hauntings and seemingly unexplainable phenomena experienced by others.  He ends by repeating a statement made by the Spectator's review of An Adventure in 1911, saying that it "probably best sums up the current status of the case as it did a century ago" -- it is

"a challenge to be answered, a problem to solved, now or a century hence, or never." (340)

 If you can find it, there's also a dvd based on this story (although seriously embellished -- I know, since I watched it after finishing An Adventure) called Miss Morison's Ghost, with Dame Wendy Hiller in the title role.  And while it's your own call whether or not the story is a hoax, An Adventure is still a fine read for anyone at all interested in otherworldly sorts of phenomena. 

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections From the Making of Fitzcarraldo, by Werner Herzog

"I looked around, and there was the jungle, manifesting the same seething hatred, wrathful and steaming, while the river flowed by in majestic indifference and scornful condescension, ignoring everything:  the plight of man, the burden of dreams, and the torments of time."

                                                                                                                         -- 299

A couple of months ago I found great joy in reading Ned Beauman's strange but wonderful novel Madness is Better Than Defeat, set mainly in the Honduran jungle which among other things, features a character whose task is to direct a film called "Hearts in Darkness" against the backdrop of an old Mayan temple. What he and his crew of actors and others do not know before they leave is that this same temple is also the destination for another group sent into the jungle, whose job is to dismantle the ruin piece by piece and ship it back to the US.  Eventually both groups come together and a standoff ensues.  One of the things that struck me while reading this book was the director's obsession with finishing this film and getting it just right in spite of the ensuing calamities, and it was impossible to read it without thinking about the making of Apocalypse Now and all of the huge setbacks encountered by Francis Ford Coppola.  After reading the book I looked through several interviews with Ned Beauman, and somewhere (and with apologies, I was dumb and didn't bookmark it), he made mention of Werner Herzog, another obsessive director who made Fitzcarraldo.  I'd seen the movie eons ago but I decided I'd watch it again, which then led me to Burden of Dreams,  the story behind that film.  Both were fascinating, but I wasn't quite finished yet -- I had to buy a copy of Herzog's Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo because at that time I was hooked on this story.  And I had to know what made this man tick.

9780061575549
Ecco, 2010
originally published as Eroberung des Nutzlosen, 2004
translated by Krishna Winston
306 pp -- paperback

As Herzog tells us in his preface, the book is not a collection of "reports on the actual filming," and it is not a journal, "except in a very general sense."  He refers to it as "inner landscapes, born of the delirium of the jungle," but then says that he's not sure if that's really it either.   The book covers the period from June 1979 through November 1981, and while it is filled with some of the struggles he endured while trying to get his movie off the ground, it is also a deeply personal account, suffused with his observations about the Amazon jungle, its people, the rivers, and his relationship with nature,  trying to find some insight into it all while trying to maintain a sense of calm as the leader of the enterprise.   

For anyone unfamiliar with the movie Fitzcarraldo, it is very loosely based on the story of a Peruvian rubber baron, Carlos Fermin Fitzcarrald. As Herzog explains in Burden of Dreams, the director only cared about one part of Fitzcarrald's story, in which he dismantles a ship and moves it across an isthmus onto another part of the river. In Conquest of the Useless he reveals how he sees it:

"It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape,, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong."

In Herzog's film Fitzcarraldo buys a ship and uses the native people who have joined him and his crew to move the ship up a steep slope to another part of the river where he can access his newly-bought rubber holdings, the profits of which he will use to realize his dream of building an opera house in Iquitos (a la the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus).   I won't go into any great detail here, but what I discovered in reading this book is that there are a number of similarities between Herzog and his character Fitzcarraldo, who is more than once referred to in the film as "the conquistador of the useless."  Both are dreamers, and both in their own way are lunatics, compelled by their visions.    As just one example, Herzog's backers assumed he'd use a model steamship, but no -- as he says here, he had to have a real one "being hauled over a real mountain" because it was stylistically characteristic of "grand opera."   In another entry from February 18, 1981, he goes so far to note the idea of playing Fitzcarraldo himself,  "because my project and character have become identical."  There is no greater truth in this book to be sure.  

One more thing I'll mention is the writing.  As I noted earlier, Conquest of the Useless is not simply a reconstruction of his time in the Amazon jungle while making the film, and Herzog's personal observations are beautifully conveyed through his prose. I noted one that I'll share here, made while he is in Belén near Christmas 1980:

"...Outside I looked down at the river for a long time, trying to regain some composure. Chatas, flat barges, are chugging along, carrying pipes for distant oil-drilling operations. Belén is partially under water. Today at daybreak the birds were pleading for the continued existence of the Creation. For them, anything but the continuation of the status quo is deadly. My watch has stopped now once and for all but for a long time I have been thinking in Amazonian terms anyway: before dinner, after the storm, toward evening. A blind, barefoot beggar was groping his way along the wall of a house. A woman was drinking water from an aluminum pot in which slimy fish from the river, with big eyes, were floating. One of them was dead, its underside white, belly up. Then a child drank from the pot."

 Having seen Fitzcarraldo before reading this book,  I wasn't surprised here at his ability to pick up on such detail, but I came away from Conquest of the Useless  with the conviction that his artistry went well beyond his directing skills. 

Of course, if you're interested in such details as his frustration with Klaus Kinski, or what it was like to work with Mick Jagger and Claudia Cardinale, that's here too, but this book reaches much deeper than a simple tell-all sort of thing.

highly recommended, even for people who haven't seen the movie, but you'll get much more from it if you do.