polite exercises; will practice embroidery and other gentle work, will be skilled in making embellishments for women, will marry only once, will have more girls than boys, will love gardens and fragrant things, precious stones, and everything that can adorn the ladies; will be welcome among them, and will live seventy-two years or more. He will be a maker of musical instruments, and a skillful dancer and musician.
"The man who is born on Saturday is apparently solitary, melancholy, and idle, will be glad when his work is done, will suffer in his legs and knees; he will be avaricious, trying to borrow and not return, will go to prison for debts, will be badly dressed for fear of want, and will be subject to rash, gall, and other diseases. In fortune he will have luck in finding treasures, will be rich in inheritances; he will live nearly a hundred years, according to the course of Nature; will addict himself to occult sciences, will be fortunate in solid things like wood, iron, stones, etc., will be fond of many evil things which I will not put down here, there being no need to tell everything. He will be indolent, weak, of bad appearance, lame, poor, ill-formed, if he is not looked upon by the sun or by Venus.
"The whole will be according to the will of God."
Having thus made these wonderful predictions, the Sieur de Conac does not fail to look out for himself, and we read the following little personal item:
"The aforesaid astrologer tells fortunes of the past and the future, reads the disposition of persons in their physiognomy, and sells drugs for the cure of diseases, and has other interesting secrets in his line. The said mathematician lives at Château Gaillard, at the end of the Pont-Neuf, near the Hôtel de Nevers."
This pleasant announcement need not surprise us, for do we not find at the end of this century—this century of progress and light—advertisements in the papers making known to the simple of both sexes that Madame X, the celebrated cartomancist,
predicts the future from the lines of the hand and plays the great game? While the cartomancists of the nineteenth century have their clients, it would be hard to find out why an astrologer should not have had them two centuries and a half ago.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.
