The Tarot de Paris

Sometime in the first half of the seventeenth century a Paris workshop printed a tarot to its own design, and exactly one copy survived. The Tarot de Paris is the oldest complete French tarot in existence, and it belongs to no pattern: not Marseille, not the Viéville line, nothing. Card XVI is not a falling tower but LA FOVDRE, a thunderbolt hurled down on men and beasts. The Star is an astronomer at his measurements. The Fool travels with a companion. Temperance is titled ATREMPANCE in old French, the Devil is a horned glutton nobody copied, and every one of the forty pips is its own small engraving, each Denier stamped with a different device, where later decks would repeat one stencil ten times.

The maker meant to be remembered and is not. Twice in the deck a banner reads FAICT A PARIS PAR, made in Paris by, and the name that should follow was never printed. The cards carry printed indexes, D9, C10, S2, a bookkeeping habit far ahead of its time, and the trumps take roman numerals in the old additive style, IIII and XIIII, with Justice at VIII and Force at XI as the French order kept them.

The deck sits beside the Jean Noblet Tarot at the Bibliothèque nationale as the other half of a question: Noblet shows the pattern that won, this deck shows how much variety Paris held before it did. Its contemporary the Jacques Viéville tarot makes a third witness. Between the three of them, the century when French tarot could still have become several different things is all on the table.