The Sibylle des Salons

The Sibylle des Salons is what French cartomancy looked like when it dressed for company. Fifty-two cards, each a small stencil-colored lithograph signed by the lithographer Mansion and long attributed to the caricaturist Grandville: lovers, lawyers, gossips, a thief making off, a widow, a blonde, a brune, the town house and the country house, and at twenty-one a shrouded Death that the drawing-room shuffled in with everything else. A miniature playing card sits in the corner of each scene, tying the oracle back to the ordinary deck the way the Gypsy Witch pack would do in Chicago half a century later.

Two cards do the machinery: number nineteen, the man for whom the cards are read, and twenty, the lady for whom the cards are read, significators to anchor the spread. The rest read almost without a book, which was the pack's charm; the captions are the meanings.

First issued around the 1840s by H. Pussey in Paris and kept in print for the rest of the century, the deck has never really left the French market. This copy, complete with its blank card and printed wrapper, came to the Bibliothèque nationale de France from the Marteau collection, and its descendants, the Vera Sibilla among them, carried the formula across Europe.