"It is true," said my good master, "that is a pleasant pastime. A
pack of cards is a book of adventure, of the kind called romances.
It is so far superior to other books of a similar kind that it can
be made and read at the same time, and that it is not necessary to
have brains to make it, nor knowledge of reading to read it. It is a
marvellous work, also, in that it offers a regular and new sense
every time its pages are shuffled. It is a contrivance never to be
too much admired, because out of mathematical principles it extracts
thousands on thousands of curious combinations, and so many singular
affinities that it is believed, contrary to all truth, that in it
are discoverable the secrets of hearts, the mystery of destinies and
the arcanum of the future. What I have said is particularly
applicable to the tarot of the Bohemians, which is the finest of all
games, piquet not excepted. The invention of cards must be ascribed
to the ancients, and as far as I am concerned--I have, to speak
candidly, no kind of documentary evidence for my assertion--I
believe them to be of Chaldean origin. But in their present
appearance the piquet cards cannot be traced further back than to
King Charles VII., if what is said in a learned essay, that I
remember to have read at Seez, is true, that the queen of hearts is
an emblematical likeness of the beautiful Agnes Sorel, and that the
queen of spades is, under the name of Pallas, no other than that
Jeanne Dulys, better known as Joan of Arc, who by her bravery re-
established the business of the French monarchy and was afterwards
boiled to death by the English, in a cauldron, shown for two
farthings at Rouen, where I have seen it in passing through that
city. Certain historians pretend that she was burnt alive at the
stake. It is to be read in the works of Nicole Gilles and in
Pasquier that St Catherine and St Margaret appeared to her.
Certainly it was not God who sent these saints to her, because there