The Heart is card number 24 of the Petit Lenormand, the thirty-six card deck read in the nineteenth-century French cartomantic tradition that took its name, after her death in 1843, from the Parisian fortune-teller Marie Anne Lenormand.
Image, meaning and playing card
The card shows a heart. In the tradition its core sense is love, affection, warmth and joy; the principal card of the affections and of romantic feeling.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Jack of Hearts, a survival of the ordinary piquet pack over which the pictorial Lenormand was laid. Lenormand cards are read less as standing symbols than in combination, each modifying the cards to either side, so that the heart takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Das Herz. As House 24 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on love and affection specifically, distinguished from the Ring's narrower sense of formal commitment. In combination, Heart followed by Ring reads as love moving toward a formal commitment or proposal, while Heart preceding Snake reads as affection complicated by deception or a rival. The Heart is conventionally treated, alongside the Ring, as one of the deck's two central cards for any reading concerned specifically with romantic questions.