Telling fortunes by cards

In our day and generation divination by cards is chiefly employed for amusement and pastime, for the entertainment of one's self or one's company, or at church fairs, charity bazars, and the like; but in the days of the ancients it was practiced by prophets and sibyls as a serious business, and so accepted by all, from king to peasant.

Certainly there were some remarkable coincidences, to call them by no other name, in the fulfillment of many cartomantic divinations, of which history maintains a record. To cite but one:

THE STORY OF JOSEPHINE, EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH.

Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, while in her native land of Martinique, had been approached by an aged negress, who astonished her through declaring to her: "You will ascend upon the loftiest throne in the world."

Always treasuring the memory of this prediction, Josephine, when the widow of Gen. Beauharnais, during the bitter days of the Reign of Terror, was induced to consult a distinguished seeress of the Faubourg St. Germain, who relied upon cartomancy as a means for elucidating the mysteries of the past, present, and future. Although her visitor was disguised as a waiting woman, the seeress, through a simple resort to her pack of cards, read most correctly the entire past existence of her consultant. Then, by the same means, she laid bare the gloomy picture of Josephine's present situation; how the prison doors of the Luxembourg stood ready to receive her; how the guillotine thirsted for her life's blood; how, nevertheless, she would be saved from all these impending dangers through intercession of a young soldier, to her at the time personally a stranger. Subsequently, by a fresh appeal to her cards, the seeress threw aside the veil obscuring Josephine's future destiny, predicting her marriage, the onward march of her husband towards fame and power, until finally, after a studious observation of the cards, the cartomancian announced to her skeptical consultant that on a given day, within the cathedral church of Notre Dame, the unknown man she was destined to marry would place upon her head an imperial diadem, and furthermore that she would be hailed, in the presence of the highest ecclesiastical potentate on earth, as "Empress of the French," and as such would be respected until her death.

The remarkably rapid and literal fulfillment of the predictions made by a professional seeress to an unknown lady, to whom she promised the most exalted of mortal positions, not only astonished the crowd of courtiers, wonder-stricken at realization of this indisputable and well-authenticated augury of miraculous events; but elicited the attention of men of intellect and of science, hundreds of whom visited the remarkable prophetess, and in every instance testified to the accuracy of her predictions, although at a loss to comprehend the source from whence she attained apparently super-human knowledge. It appeared wonderful to these men of science that the mere combination of a series of cards, which they had been accustomed to look upon as a mere species of diversion, could be employed as well to read the past as to penetrate the mysteries of the future; still they were compelled, in an elaborate report made to the Emperor, whose comprehensive mind yearned after explanation of all secrets, mental as well as physical, to state that, while unable to account for the cause for this prophetic knowledge, there could be no rational doubt of its existence.

RESEARCHING GYPSY LORE.