 Johann K. Hechtel (1771–1799) The petit Lenormand as we know it today was based on an earlier card game called the Game of Hope that was created in Germany by Johann Kaspar Hechtel in 1799. He was a German businessman and designer of parlor games including the prototype for the Petit Lenormand. Click picture at left to take you to the Wikipedia page.
Instead of one playing card insert, this deck had two at the top, one of a French style, the other German, that accommodated various styles of play. The familiar Lenormand images we see today were the primary pictures. This pack was easily carried by travelers or soldiers that could create a spur-of-the-moment board game by laying out the cards 1-36 in six rows. Dice & tokens were used to move from one card to another. Interestingly, the directions that came with the deck also included instructions for a fortune telling game that could be laid out in the same way as the traditional Grand Tableau spread.
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I found a book that describes in two chapters Josephine Beauharnais' first visit with Marie Lenormand: The Romance of Alexandre Dumas from the D'artagnan Edition, Little Brown and Co., 1894. The Les Blancs et Les Bleus (The Whites and the Blues) Volume 2, written by Alexandre Dumas in 1867-1868; Chapter 28, The Sibyl and Chapter 29, Fortune-Telling.
The chapters recount the social call that Josephine and her Spanish companion, Therese Cabarus (Madame Tallien, the daughter of a famous Spanish banker), make to the famous sibyl of Paris, Mademoiselle Marie Anne Lenormand. The first excerpt below is from Chapter 28, The Sibyl, pages 28-31: |
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