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November 1, 2018 13 mins

First, two women compete for the same reality. Then, two other women explore the nature of time itself. Both stories will leave you glad you toured the Cabinet today.

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Episode Transcript

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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history
is an open book, all of these amazing tales are
right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.
Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities. Madeline Moore came into

(00:28):
the world. She was born in talent Court, a small
village in France, where she lived with her three brothers
and one sister. Her mother died giving birth to the
youngest child, and her father abandoned the family soon after,
leaving them to be cared for by the state. As
a result, Madeleine grew up in the foster system, but

(00:50):
as she got older she worked as a servant on
local farms. Her story doesn't end there, though. In her
teenage years, conflict of did across Europe, sending countries around
her into a Second World War. To find safety, Madeline
fled to Orleone, where she found refuge inside a convent.

(01:10):
During her time there, the war claimed two of her brothers,
but her remaining siblings, her brother Renee and her sister Nancy,
both remained close for years to come. In fact, Madeleine
would later work in a factory just one town over
from Nancy. All the way up till nineteen sixty seven.
That's when she met and married a railway worker and

(01:31):
the two of them moved to Algeria to start fresh,
and Madeleine never moved back to France after that. She
lived out the rest of her life with her husband
in the Mediterranean. It's a nice story, isn't it. A
life that began with tragedy, only to be torn apart
by wars, ends up full of peace and tranquility. But

(01:52):
even after all of that, Madeline's story doesn't end there.
In fact, it was just beginning in her eighties. Madeleine
had to return to her hometown in talon Court in
two thousand six to renew her I D card and
secure her government pension. She brought with her the usual
documentation like her birth certificate and her passport and presented

(02:16):
them in what should have been a pretty simple process.
There was just one problem. Madeline Moore had already claimed
her government pension. Her checks were sent to Saint Etienne,
her home of the past twenty years. Obviously, our Madeline
was confused and possibly even upset. Sure she had lived

(02:36):
in Algeria for nearly four decades, but she was the
real Madeline Moore she had the paperwork to prove it.
Of course, the authorities assumed it was just a simple
case of identity theft. Someone else was pretending to be
Madeleine in order to claim her pension as their own.
They just needed to spend some time investigating it to
sort it all out, and then all the confusion would

(02:59):
go away. Except it didn't. When this new Madaline arrived
from her home in Saint Etienne, she produced the exact
same documentation, a birth certificate, I D card, even old
past dubs, all of them clearly showing identical details to
our Madaline. More both women gave detailed descriptions of their

(03:23):
upbringings to the police. Each of them explained how their
mother had died young and their father had abandoned them.
Each woman described living in foster care after that. This
new Madaline seemed to know every single detail of our
own Madaline's life, right down to the most tragic pieces. Clearly,
this was no longer a case of a stranger getting

(03:46):
ahold of forged documents to steal a little money. This
was something else, something stranger. But being the twenty one century,
they had new tools to lean on, tools like d
n A, so they acquired a sample from Renee, Madeline's brother,
who had survived the war, and then took samples of
both women to compare them, and the results were conclusive.

(04:09):
Our Madaline was the real Madeline, and I'm sure you're
as relieved as I am to hear that. But it
still wasn't over because there was a new piece of
evidence that muddied the waters rather than making them more clear.
It was an old black and white photograph that Renee
had sent to his sister. It had been taken during
their time at the orphanage when they were children. In

(04:31):
the photo, the police could clearly see young Madeline posing
in a sun filled field with a smile on her face.
But she wasn't alone. Renee was there and he had
his arms around another girl. It was clear that the
first girl was Madeline, our Madeleine, of course, but everyone
wondered who the second girl was. Renee didn't remember when

(04:52):
he handed the photo to his sister, but someone did
recognize the second girl. One of the policemen, the one
who had been interviewing the new Magdaline for hours that day,
was absolutely certain that the stranger in the photo was
the elderly woman sitting across the table from him. After
he pointed it out to the others, everyone else agreed,

(05:14):
which was weird because neither of the women had any
memory of the photograph being taken. It's understandable, really, the
photo must have been seventy years old. I have a
hard enough time remembering what I did two weeks ago,
so seven decades must have felt like an eternity. They
had no memory of the photo, no memory of ever meeting,
but clearly they lived at the same orphanage way back

(05:37):
in the nineteen thirties. None of this explains how both
women came to think of themselves as Madeline More. Perhaps
the war had been too rough on the second woman
and she began to slowly think of herself as the
girl she'd spent time with at the orphanage. Maybe she
pretended for a while, and as time went on that
new persona took over and replaced the woman and she

(06:00):
had once been. Or maybe it was all an intentional
lie and she was just really committed to it. Whatever
the reason, I'd like to think there was more to
the story, don't you. Time is a tricky thing. Some

(06:29):
believe it moves in a straight line, while others believe
it's destined to repeat itself. Nietzschie referred to it as
eternal return, that the universe and everything inside will loop
forever across infinite time and space. That's pretty heavy stuff,
I know, and it might be a strange concept to
grasp if you haven't experienced it. They must have felt

(06:51):
that way to Charlotte and Eleanor too, who got to
experience it firsthand for themselves. Six Charlotte Mobley was appointed
as the principal of a school for young women in Oxford.
As her duties became more overwhelming than one person could handle,
she considered bringing on someone else to help with the

(07:12):
day to day operations. Someone suggested she talked to a
woman named Eleanor Jordaan, who ran a school of her own.
She had an apartment in Paris, and Charlotte took the
opportunity to stay with her as both a vacation and
a job interview. Both women had a love for travel,
and in nineteen o one, during Charlotte's stay at Eleanor's place,

(07:34):
they toured several locations around France. One such landmark was
the Palace of Versailles, built by Louis the palace had
been home to French royalty for generations, including two of
its most famous residents, Louis the sixteenth and his wife
Marie Antoinette. After a tour of the place and its

(07:56):
vast marble interiors, elaborate tapestries, and sprawling corridors, Eleanor and
Charlotte found the whole thing underwhelming. I'm not sure what
they were expecting, but Versailles didn't do it for them.
So instead of going home right away, they decided to
explore more of the grounds and see the Petit Trianon,

(08:16):
a chateau built by Louis and where Marie Antoinette was
known to spend most of her time. But they got lost.
Eleanor and Charlotte spent more time looking down at their
guide book then at the path they were walking on,
and as a result, they wandered off the main route
and couldn't find their way back. As they did, the

(08:37):
overall mood of the world around them seemed to shift.
They later recalled that they both felt a wave of
nausea washed over them, so much so that they had
to flag down to gardeners for help. At least that's
what they thought. The two men were, since both men
had been pushing a wheelbarrow nearby. But there was something
different about them, something off. Rather than wearing modern clothing

(09:01):
of nineteen o one France, their outfits seemed two centuries
too old. Despite being dressed in an odd manner, the
men were helpful and they guided the two women back
toward the Petit Tree Anon. Charlotte and Eleanor considered the
men as they walked with them. Maybe they were actors
dressed up in period clothing for some performance elsewhere at

(09:22):
the palace. Before they could decide, however, events took an
even weirder turn. They passed a cottage where a woman
in rustic clothing handed a little girl a jug of water.
At another building, a man wearing a thick black coat
and a wide brimmed hat looked straight at them, his
face covered in the tell tale marks of smallpox. They

(09:44):
were startled by yet another man, who ran up behind
them and ushered them towards the Petit Tre Anon, where
Charlotte witnessed the site that would haunt her for the
rest of her life. It was a woman, also in
vintage garments, and she was sketching on the grass in
front of the palace. She wore a summer dress and
a large white hat which sat upon a head of

(10:07):
thick yellow hair. Eleanor didn't see the woman, but Charlotte
thought back to the gardeners in their green jackets and
eighteenth century hats, the man with the thick cloak and smallpox,
and the poor woman with the child. This woman was
no different. Her clothes appeared new, but of a style
much older than anything Charlotte and Eleanor were used to.

(10:29):
And this beautiful, fair haired woman bore a striking resemblance
to the palace's former homeowner, a woman who had well
lost her head. The woman Charlotte was looking at was
none other than Marie Antoinette. The women didn't talk to
each other about what they had seen until a week later.

(10:50):
They compiled their story of what they called a time
slip into a book titled An Adventure, which they published
in nineteen eleven under the pseudonyms Elizabeth Morrison and Francis Lamont.
The tale and its authors were widely ridiculed in publications
all over the world. One critic had written a biography
of a French aristocrat by the name of Robert de Montesquieu,

(11:13):
who had been known to have thrown lavish parties, were
guests dressed in period clothing and post for living paintings.
It was possible that Charlotte and Eleanor had stumbled into
one of these gatherings, but some things didn't quite add up.
The young girl and her mother, who had been dressed
in peasant clothing, as well as the man with smallpox,
didn't seem like they would be welcome at such an

(11:34):
extravagant party, and the dreadful feeling that washed over the
two academic women as they ventured deeper into the gardens
couldn't be explained away either. It's easy for us to
scoff at stories like the one told by Charlotte Moberly
and Eleanor Jordan. If we can't see it for ourselves,
how are we to know if it's true or not.

(11:55):
Tales of alien abductions, Bigfoot, and the Lockness Months have
survived because our fascination with the unexplainable, and this story
was no different. Charlotte and Eleanor swore that they had
caught a glimpse of a time gone by, that they
had experienced life in a time that was very much
not their own, and they wanted us to know about it.

(12:19):
I'd like to believe it all really happened, and that
someday it might happen again. A tourist might stumble through
the garden paths of Versailles and find themselves standing beside
a historical celebrity. And if they do, though, will anyone
believe them? Today? Maybe? Maybe not, Only time will tell.

(12:44):
I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet
of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn
more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com.
The show was created by me Aaron Manky in partnership
with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show
called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show,

(13:07):
and you can learn all about it over at the
World of Lore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.

Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News

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