Mme. Fontaine was at this time the oracle of the Marais; she had survived the rival of forty years, the celebrated Mlle. Lenormand.  No one imagines the part that fortune-tellers play among Parisians of the lower classes, nor the immense influence which they exert over the uneducated; general servants, portresses, kept women, workmen, all the many in Paris who live on hope, consult the privileged beings who possess the mysterious power of reading the future.

The belief of the occult science is far more widely spread than scholars, lawyers, doctors, magistrates, and philosophers imagine.  The instincts of the people are ineradicable.  One among those instincts, so foolishly styled “superstition,” runs in the blood of the populace, and tinges no less the intellects of better educated folk.  More than one French statesman has been known to consult the fortune-teller’s cards.  For sceptical minds, astrology, in French, so oddly termed astrologie judiciare, is nothing more than a cunning device for making a profit out of one of the strongest of all the instincts of human nature—­to wit, curiosity.  The sceptical mind consequently denies that there is any connection between human destiny and the prognostications obtained by the seven or eight principal methods known to astrology; and the occult sciences, like many natural phenomena, are passed over by the freethinker or the materialist philosopher, id est, by those who believe in nothing but visible and tangible facts, in the results given by the chemist’s retort and the scales of modern physical science.  The occult sciences still exist; they are at work, but they make no progress, for the greatest intellects of two centuries have abandoned the field.

If you only look at the practical side of divination, it seems absurd to imagine that events in a man’s past life and secrets known only to himself can be represented on the spur of the moment by a pack of cards which he shuffles and cuts for the fortune-teller to lay out in piles according to certain mysterious rules; but then the steam-engine was condemned as absurd, aerial navigation is still said to be absurd, so in their time were the inventions of gunpowder, printing, spectacles, engraving, and that latest discovery of all—­the daguerreotype.  If any man had come to Napoleon to tell him that a building or a figure is at all times and in all places represented by an image in the atmosphere, that every existing object has a spectral intangible double which may become visible, the Emperor would have sent his informant to Charenton for a lunatic, just as Richelieu before his day sent that Norman martyr, Salomon de Caux, to the Bicetre for announcing his immense triumph, the idea of navigation by steam.  Yet Daguerre’s discovery amounts to nothing more nor less than this.

And if for some clairvoyant eyes God has written each man’s destiny over his whole outward and visible form, if a man’s body is the record of his fate, why should not the hand in a manner epitomize the body? —­since the hand represents the deed of man, and by his deeds he is known.