THE book before us is written by two English ladies

who are convinced, severally and jointly, by certain personal experiences that they saw and heard, in the Petit Trianon, in 1901, the sights and sounds of Marie Antoinette's time.. They met personages of that time who spoke to them ; they saw buildings of that time, and the arrangement of the gardens of that time ; they were " doing " the Trianon, but it is the Trianon of 120 years ago that they did. A. kiosk, a bridge, a cascade, a cottage, a shrubbery, all these, and much else, they saw which are not there, but were there in the Queen's time. The people whom they met were her people ; the costumes were the costumes of her Court; the music which one of them heard was the music of her concerts ; and the lady whom one of them saw was the Queen herself.

The good faith of this " adventure " is not open to doubt. The point at issue is the explanation, not the impression made on the mind of the two ladies. They are well known to a legion of friends and acquaintances, among whom the

present writer has the honour to be included. They haVe published this memoir because they had patiently studied every point of the evidence, and because they were tired of their own facts being told to them: Imagine St. Paul, An Adventure. London: liracesillaa and Co. De. 6d.] when some conversational person asked him whether he ever:

beard that curious story of somebody somewhere near Damascus, who bad some sort of a vision, and did he think it was a sunstroke? These two ladies were beginning to feel like that; so they wrote this book, a touchstone of the judg- ment, a refiner's fire, a challenge to be answered, a problem to be solved, now, or a century hence, or never.

The first "adventure "happened to both of them on August 10th, 1901; but their experiences that day were not exactly alike. The second happened to one of them alone at the Trianon, in January, 1902. Each wrote her own account of

the first adventure ; this was done in November, 1901. During the years 1902-]904 one of them was often at the Trianon, but saw nothing strange : only, they were beginning to find, here or there, bits of evidence that they had indeed seen and heard the Queen's Trianon. In July, 1904, they went twice together; they found nothing. " We spent a long time looking for the old paths. Not only was there no trace, of them, but the distances were contracted, and all was on a smaller scale than I recollected. The kiosk was gone; so was the ravine and the little cascade which had fallen from a height above

our heads, and the little bridge over the ravine was, of course, gone too Instead of a much-shaded, rough meadow continuing up to the wall of the terrace, there is now a broad gravel sweep beneath it, and the trees on the grass are gone.

Exactly where the lady was sitting we found a large spreading bush of apparently many years growth." In brief, the land- marks of the vision were gone; the whole place was different. Therefore, after July, 1904, they set to work; for years they studied.

" 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. 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 Librairies Nationales, Hotel de Ville, and in the Muses Carnavalet, and in the Conservatoire de Musique at Paris. . ..... We believe that there is not likely to be any striking documentary evidence other than we have dealt with."

They give a " Summary of Results of Research." It is past

all explaining away. One of them had seen a hand-plough, of an odd shape ; the:e is no plough at Trianon, but an old plough,

of the time of Louis XV., with handles such as they saw, was at Trianon in the Queen's time, and was sold with the King's other properties during the Revolution. One of them saw a cottage ; there is none there now, but a map, dated 1783, indicates a building where she saw the cottage, and they found, in 1910, marks where this building had stood. They saw a kiosk : it is gone, but they found a builder's estimate for it, and evidence of it in old maps. The lady had a light yellowish skirt, not,fresh white, a green bodice, a white fichn ; they have found these very things in the journal of the Queen's modiste, 1789; " there is a coloured picture of the green silk bodice, with all the measurements to enable her to fit the Queen perfectly." One of them heard violins, " the sounds were very soft and intermittent; and were lower in pitch than

bands of to-day." She wrote down from memory about twelve bars, and showed them to one of the greatest living authorities on old music. " He said, without having heard the story, that the bars could hardly belong to one another, but that the idiom dated from about 1780. He found a grammatical mistake in one bar. After hearing the story, he said that bands in the eighteenth century were lower in pitch than they are now. He suggested the name of Sacchini," and they have found in the old forgotten light operas of the Queen's time- Sacchini and others—these very phrases, these broken memories of the old music of the Trianon. These are some of the instances in the Summary of Results of Research."

The next part of the book is "Answers to questions which we have been asked." It is an account of themselves, their .condition at the time of the adventure, their investigations, ;their judgment of their own minds. All the usual suggestions —thought transference, a chance masquerade, people posing

for a cinematograph, and so forth—receive all the attention that they _deserve, and more. The last part of the book is a

reverent and careful attempt to describe- all that wa-s in the-

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Queen's mind, on August 10, 1792, through the day"of the massacre of the „Swiss guards, and the ten hours of mental agony during the sitting Of the Legislative Assembly. They ' believe, and doubtless they. are right, that the Queen on that awful day remembered, in her misery, in her ten hours 'of weariness and of horror, the Trianon ; that her thoughts went back to the people she had known there, the gardens she ha l loved there, the voices and:the music she had beard there. And they are inclined to believe that they, somehow, in their adventure, were entering into that act of memory.' "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 was that of the Queen. Our. theory of 1901, that we had entered into the working of the Queen's memory when she was still alive, is now enlarged. We think that the first two 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 yeare ago, and have heard sounds familiar, and even something of words spoken, to her then." It is to be noted that 'some people do say that the Trianon, on a certain day in August, is indeed " haunted "; that the Queen • is seen there, and the people of her time.

But this is no ghost story ; for ploughs and cottages have no ghosts. Neither is it a case of " thought-transference "—for neither of the ladies had the thoughts to transfer—nothing was further from their thoughts than the kiosk and the bridge and the men who spoke to them. And the less we say about subliminal consciousness the better : there can hello subliminal consciousness of garden furniture which was swept away a hundred years ago. In any case, let the readers of this strange book study it carefully, and then form, if they can, a better guess than that of its authors, that they did indeed enter into

an act of the Queen's memory. - - •