The Livre du Destin

The Livre du Destin, the Book of Fate, is the sibylle formula pared to its working parts: thirty-two cards, one clean lithographed scene each, a caption below and a miniature playing card above. Half the deck is a portrait gallery, the lawyer, the courtier, the widower, the dark man, the blonde woman, the soldier, the merchant, cast so a reader could point to the querent's acquaintances one by one; the other half is event cards, marriage, money, voyage, illness, treachery, a business letter, a love note. Hope gets the deck's single allegory, and night flies over a ruin as owls and bats.

The pack was sold by H. Pussey of Paris, the same house as the Sibylle des Salons, with a sewn booklet, L'Art de tirer les cartes avec le Livre du Destin, that the Bibliothèque nationale kept with this copy; deck and manual together were the whole apparatus of a fortune-telling evening. The plaid backs and stencil color date this printing to the last third of the nineteenth century.

Beside the crowded double-ended Petit Oracle des Dames the Livre du Destin reads like a cleanup: one meaning per card, one scene per meaning, the format the twentieth century's oracle decks settled on and never left.