6th/7th Story – Madame Lenormand and the Flower Card

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Please do not repost my translations. Links to the page are appreciated. Translated by @courtneylazore.

This post was originally published as the 6th story in 2017, then deleted from the blog and reuploaded in 2018. The post was deleted again and reuploaded in 2020 as the 7th story.

There is a piece of art called “Madame Lenormand in the Salon” by French artist Jean Francois Rolland. Madame Lenormand was a French astrologer cherished by Napoleon’s Empress Josephine. (If you read it in French, it’s ‘renoreumang’ but for convenience’s sake, I’m writing it as ‘rehnomeondeu’.) Before she became Empress Josephine’s exclusive astrologer, she gained popularity from telling fortunes for noblewomen and amassed a fortune. The card she made, “Lenormand oracle card,” is known to have influenced a considerable number of card decks. There are also still some taro card sites that sell oracle card decks.

Since Madame Lenormand was a famous astrologer, many paintings of her holding cards or reading fortunes remain. The picture above is one of them. But the picture we need to pay attention to is not the one above, but rather the artwork “Madame Lenormand in the Salon.”

“Madame Lenormand in the Salon,” by French artist Jean Francois Rolland, was an oil painting characterized by a delicate touch and a lyrical atmosphere, and it was lost in a fire in the owner’s mansion. The owner of the mansion was famous for having a number of paintings and materials from the Napoleonic era that showed image of the upper society, so some works were found at the scene of the fire immediately and restored. Many artworks and materials were restored through that process, but regrettably for “Madame Lenormand in the Salon,” only the card part was saved.

That’s the card picture I introduced in the previous post. The card with “The Flower” written on it, which may have snatched your attention, is one of the Ashbless cards modeled after the smeraldo. It’s the only remaining trace of smeraldo and Ashbless.