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.
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