“An Emperor shall be born near Italy,
Who shall cost dear to the Empire:
They shall say, With what people he keepeth company!
He shall be found less a prince than a butcher.
From a simple soldier he shall come to have the supreme command,
From a short gown he shall come to the long one;
Valiant in arms, no worse man in the Church,
He shall vex the priests, as water doth a sponge.”[343]
This is to say that at the moment when the church experiences the greatest calamities, he will overwhelm the priests with benefits. In a collection of prophecies published in 1820, and of which we possess a copy, the following phrase occurs after a prediction concerning Napoleon I: “And the nephew will accomplish that which the uncle failed to do.” The celebrated Mlle. Lenormand had in her library a volume in boards with a parchment back, containing the Treatise of Olivarius on Prophecies, followed by ten manuscript pages, in which the reign of Napoleon and his downfall were announced formally. The seeress imparted the contents of this work to the Empress Josephine. Having mentioned Mlle. Lenormand, a few further words may be added about this singular woman; she was stout and extremely plain, emphatic in talk, ludicrous in style, but a waking somnambulist of conspicuous lucidity. She was the fashionable seeress under the First Empire and the Restoration. There is nothing more wearisome than are her writings, but as a teller of fortunes by cards she was most successful.
Cartomancy, as restored in France by Etteilla, is literally the questioning of fate by signs agreed on beforehand. These in combination with numbers suggest oracles to the medium, who is biologised by staring at them. The signs are drawn by chance, after having shuffled them slowly; they are arranged according to Kabalistic numbers, and they respond invariably to the thoughts of those who question them, seriously and in good faith, for all of us carry a world of presentiments within us which any pretext will formulate. Susceptible and sensitive natures receive from us a magnetic shock which conveys to them the impression of our nervous state. The medium can then read our fears and hopes in ripples of water, forms of clouds, counters cast haphazard on the ground, in the marks made on a plate by the grouts of coffee, in the lottery of a card-game, or in the Tarot symbols.