The Tarot Reader of Versailles

Anya Bergman

WHEN two young women – both born with the extraordinary gift of ‘sight’ – become caught up in the terrors of the French Revolution, they discover that their fates could be forged or broken by the simple turn of a card.

Thrilling tales of rogue women practising their ‘dark arts’ in times of mortal danger are always destined to be a winner and Irish writer Anya Bergman (pictured below) – author of spellbinding bestseller The Witches of Vardø set in 17th century Norway – finds new and rich territory for her dazzling storytelling talents in the blood-soaked streets of Paris, and the untamed countryside of rural Ireland.

Encompassing both Revolutionary France and the Great Rebellion in Ireland, The Tarot Reader of Versailles is a sweeping, fantasy-fuelled tale of allegiances, betrayals, love and intrigue, and was inspired by the amazing true story of Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand who famously set up her own secret – and illegal – tarot salon in Paris where she read the cards for both royalists and radical revolutionaries like Robespierre, Marat and Saint-Just.

Her story was one which Bergman – who has been reading tarot cards professionally for over thirty years – felt compelled to write as she has long been curious about Lenormand’s rise from a poor orphan girl raised in a Normandy convent to the most sought-after fortune teller not just in Paris but amongst the royal residents of the Palace of Versailles.

Add on the author’s fascination with the little-known Irish involvement in the French Revolution, and the growth of the United Irishmen in Paris which eventually led to French troops invading Ireland during the Great Rebellion of 1798, and you have a pulsating plot packed with peril, passion, magic and intrigue.

Raised in a Normandy convent, orphan girl Lenormand always knew that she had a special talent which would take her far from the oppression of her early life… by reading her tarot cards, she can see what the future holds and commune with the dead. Her mother’s spirit has assured her that her destiny lies in Paris and that her future is bright, and after bribing a coachman to take her to the glittering city, she soon establishes herself as a tarot card reader and although her trade is illegal, her growing list of privileged clients keep her out of jail because ‘who would risk disclosure of the secrets they have shared with her?’

With ardent revolutionaries and the aristocracy alike seeking her out to divine their fortunes, Lenormand is soon reading the cards at the Palace of Versailles where she is fiercely loyal to Queen Marie Antoinette and her young son Louis Charles, the dauphin of France. But Lenormand has seen the queen’s future in the cards and must take care that it doesn’t become her own. And then, one fateful day, she comes across Cait Molloy, a scullery maid from County Kerry who has travelled to Paris in search of her love, a young Irishman looking to garner French support for a rebellion back home in Ireland.

Cait has powers, too… she can read people’s pasts just as Lenormand can read their futures. The two women share an electrifying connection, drawn to each other’s abilities but Cait is hiding something. And when the Terror of the French Revolution takes hold, what will she do – and who will she betray – to bring revolution to the shores of her own beloved Ireland? And will the women’s supernatural ‘powers’ save them… or damn them?

Travelling back in time to the opulence and excesses of the glittering Palace of Versailles was always going to be a thrill ride but The Tarot Reader of Versailles is also a fantastical adventure full of simmering Sapphic romance and dangerous necromancy… all powered to perfection by Bergman’s evocative storytelling and breathtaking scene-setting.

Fate and fortune prove to be the most important drivers in this heady and compulsive exploration of violent uprisings in two countries which might be many miles apart but together face the ever-growing threat of explosive discontent and the compulsive, unstoppable desire for irrevocable change. Caught up in the epic struggle are two bold and brave women in possession of dangerous powers which could see them facing a death sentence if they make one false move. With their destinies linked, they must negotiate a path first through the salons of Versailles and then through the heady but deadly events of the French Revolution and the Great Rebellion in Ireland.

Plunged into the centre of palace politics, magic and mystery, Lenormand and Cait find themselves adrift in a world turned upside down, struggling with the tensions of an unspoken love for each other, torn apart by betrayal, and facing a future that even the tarot cards cannot foretell. With lashings of seductive mysticism, layers of rich and intoxicating historical detail, and set against the bone-chilling, blood-curdling terrors of the French Revolution, and the darkest of days in restless Ireland, this is a gripping tale of female empowerment you won’t want to miss!
(Manilla Press, hardback, £16.99)