Portrait of Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Adelaide Le Normand, c. 1793. François Dumont (French, 1751-1831). Watercolor on ivory in a silver gilt mount; framed: 8.4 x 6.9 cm (3 5/16 x 2 11/16 in.); unframed: 7.3 x 5.8 cm (2 7/8 x 2 5/16 in.). Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Adelaide Le Normand, a famous Parisian fortune teller, was born in Alençon, France, between 1768 and 1772. Little is known of her early years, but by 1790 she had already established a strong following in Paris. Fortune telling was a highly lucrative field perhaps due to the extreme political unrest that permeated Paris in the 1790s. Al

• Contributor: CMA/BOT / Alamy Stock Photo
• Image ID: 2H0YNC9
• File size: 26.7 MB (1.1 MB Compressed download)
• Releases: Model - no | Property - no
• Dimensions: 2747 x 3400 px | 23.3 x 28.8 cm | 9.2 x 11.3 inches | 300dpi
• Date taken: 31 January 2018

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Portrait of Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Adelaide Le Normand, c. 1793. François Dumont (French, 1751-1831). Watercolor on ivory in a silver gilt mount; framed: 8.4 x 6.9 cm (3 5/16 x 2 11/16 in.); unframed: 7.3 x 5.8 cm (2 7/8 x 2 5/16 in.). Mademoiselle Marie-Anne Adelaide Le Normand, a famous Parisian fortune teller, was born in Alençon, France, between 1768 and 1772. Little is known of her early years, but by 1790 she had already established a strong following in Paris. Fortune telling was a highly lucrative field perhaps due to the extreme political unrest that permeated Paris in the 1790s. Although the practice of fortune telling was illegal at the time, people from the highest social classes sought Le Normand's services. She prophesied the bloody deaths of the French revolutionaries Maximilien Robespierre, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, and Jean-Paul Marat when they visited her salon. Additionally, Alexandre Dumas was one of many to describe Le Normand's prediction of the monumental rise and fall of both Napoleon and his wife Josephine, who visited Le Normand's studio frequently. The fortune teller managed to retain her popularity through the Napoleonic era and the reign of King Charles X before retiring from Parisian life after correctly foretelling the outcome of the July Revolution in 1830. She moved back to Alençon and continued writing books of predictions until her death in 1843. Her greatest tangible legacy is a set of tarot cards known as the Blue Owl deck or Le Grand Jeu de Mlle. Le Normand. Grimaud, a self-proclaimed pupil of Le Normand, published the deck two years after her death. The accounts of Le Normand's physical appearance and her studio are almost as colorful as her predictions, and perhaps equally disputable. A description published in the late 1850s reported how "some thirty or forty volumes were arranged on the shelf against the wall, chiefly consisting of the works of the lady herself.. Mademoiselle soon made her appearance-a short, fat lit