Marie Lenormand was born in the late 19th century in France, near Paris, in the small town of Alençon. Even as a child, she possessed magical and fortune-telling abilities that startled those around her, leading her parents to send her to the shelter of a nunnery. There, in the monastery library, she began to study books on numerology, esotericism, and magic. By the age of 18, she opened a fortune-telling salon in Paris with her closest friend.
Thanks to her prophetic abilities, her popularity quickly spread throughout France and then across Europe. Marie believed that standard card descriptions were incomplete and did not cover all possible aspects of predictions. Thus, every card in the Lenormand deck was designed to be more intuitive, even for novice fortune-tellers.