would
go early, before everybody else came, for there was often a crowd at
Mme. Fontaine's.

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 time