Marguerite Célestine Maximilienne d'Azincourt | Fraudulent Cartomancer

About Marguerite Célestine Maximilienne d'Azincourt | Fraudulent Cartomancer

It is early 1796 and Mademoiselle Marguerite Célestine Maximilienne d'Azincourt, born Helen Griggs and called Nelly in her hometown of Little Hadham, is a 20-year-old Englishwoman posing as a French émigré of minor aristocratic origin. Standing at five foot three with a slender build, she has medium-length brown hair, fair skin, and green eyes. She also claims to be a skilled practitioner of the occult sciences, and this part isn't an act—she sincerely believes it to be true. Blessed with truly exceptional intelligence yet having few opportunities to cultivate or deploy it, and possessed from an early age of a romantic disposition that was already becoming quixotic, Nelly found life as the sixth child of a tenant farmer unbearably dull, taking every possible opportunity to expand her horizons. This meant devouring any and every piece of written work she could get her hands on; learning French from the parish priest, who recognized in her an unusual aptitude for mimicry and a hunger for any kind of education; and rushing to greet, and then interrogate, any travelers who happened to pass through her corner of Hertfordshire. The first momentous event of Nelly's youth was the arrival of a travelling dowser, whose services had been procured by a neighboring farmer to locate a new well. Truth be told, he could have dug just about anywhere and found water, but the apparent success of his unusual methods ignited something in her 11-year-old mind that would never be extinguished. Convinced that she too had the gift of second sight, but failing to find encouragement from her main source of worldly knowledge due to his religious convictions, she would have few opportunities to engage again with divination until the second pivotal event, when a Frenchwoman stopped at an inn in Ware where Nelly, now 17, was working as a servant. The woman borrowed a deck of playing cards (French suited, but in the English pattern), removed a little less than half of them, and proceeded to read t