The Cartomancie of 1788

This deck was never printed. Sixty-six cards, drawn in ink and watercolored by a single unknown hand around 1788, make up a private fortune-telling pack: the Jeu de cartomancie pour l'amusement des Dames. The King card is Louis XVI in his coronation robes; the Queen is Marie-Antoinette; the ministers of war, interior and finance each get a card, as do the confessor, the financier, the chambermaid, the postman and the courtesan. It is the whole society of the last year of the old regime, dealt out for parlor divination by someone who could draw.

The dating is the poignancy. Card 58 raises the cap of Liberty a year before the Bastille; the ships come to port and founder; the map of the Danube on card 66 tracks the Austro-Turkish war then filling the gazettes. Whoever made the deck was reading fortunes on the very edge of the event that would swallow every figure in it.

The pack mixes the cartomantic vocabulary that the printed decks were standardizing, victory, abundance, quarrels, thieves, the love letter, with private jokes and classical heroes, Hercules, Jason, Semiramis, a tiger drawn from pure imagination. As the only manuscript deck in this archive, it shows what the genre looked like before print flattened it: one reader, one deck, one year, 1788.