He is shuffling the cards, curious about the coming century. A century he knows he is unlikely to enter due to a family susceptibility to kidney disease. He cuts the deck and lays the cards on the table. Here is the story of talented excess. He lays down the queen of coins, Temperance, the ace of staves, The Empress, ace of cups, The World and The Lovers. Here is a person brought up by their grandmother, a person who then rebels and becomes uncontrollable. She is sent to a charity school but on leaving the stultifying atmosphere she is finally able to train as an artist, to be queen, empress, of her own destiny. An artist she travels to Paris to undertake further training. In Paris she dances naked in a café and at parties in artists' studios, artists as renowned today as they were then. She is openly bi-sexual and not interested in a conventional relationship. She meets The Magician in Paris but the card following it, The Lovers, suggests that she already knew him. She became involved in design, the nine of cups, but the nine of cups as much as it suggests a love of pattern and colour suggests an increasing problem with alchohol. The excess that has been so liberating now seems to be destructive. Despite the beginnings of decline, the page of wands shows she is able to exhibit her work widely. She publishes a book 'The Laughing Torso', The High Priestess, and it seems that the the magician's malign influence, The Devil, leads to a court case, Justice. Whatever the court decides the artist's problems become more extreme resulting in her falling to her death as her life crumbles, The Tower.
Marseilles pack
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