THE VERSAILLES AFFAIR SIR, — Though he himself makes no mention of
it, I assume that the occasion of Mr. Rowland Mait- land's letter (Spectator, February 8) was my review article 'No End of the Affair' on Mrs. Lucille Iremonger's The Ghosts of Versailles. Yet he makes no attempt to approach the heart of the matter, 'the evidence for the crucial contention that Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain actually had on August 10, 1901, the experiences which later they certainly believed they had had on that day.' If we turn to the documents in the case we find, as I said, 'that the statements of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain by which the case has usually been judged are of uncertain date; that they are quite certainly not their earliest available written statements; and that these later statements differ at point after point from the earlier ones, in every case without exception in ways which make the story harder to fit into the Versailles of 1901 and easier to square with the Versailles of Marie Antoinette.' Mr. Maitland insists on preferring his intuitions to evidence: 'one's own reaction to it remains the same as when first read. It rings
true . . '; and 'not all Mrs. Iremonger's insidious denigrations can alter the fact that their story rings true.' Against this transcendent insight what can the pedestrian fallible critic do but suggest that even your correspondent's intuitions may be wrong?— Yours faithfully,
ANTONY FLEW
University College of North Staffordshire, Keele, Staffordshire
Previous page
