A closer look
Marie Anne Lenormand was the most famous mystical fortune-teller in post-revolutionary France, charging exorbitant fees to read cards for the absolute elite, including Emperor Napoleon and his wife Josephine, who completely based their political moves on her parlor tricks. She accurately predicted Josephine's divorce, which wasn't exactly high-level magic considering Napoleon was openly obsessed with getting a male heir and everyone in Paris knew about his very public affairs. When her prophecies annoyed powerful people, she would conveniently get thrown into prison, but she used those incarcerations purely as networking opportunities to read the palms of other rich political prisoners. She died incredibly wealthy, having successfully turned a deck of cards and a lot of very obvious political gossip into a lucrative empire, proving that the best mystical power you can possess is just paying close attention to who is sleeping with whom
