Chiromancy, the older line-reading tradition, had circulated in Europe since at least the late medieval period and had fallen into considerable disrepute by d'Arpentigny's time, tarred by association with itinerant fortune tellers and largely abandoned by anyone claiming scholarly seriousness. La Chirognomonie is usually credited with reversing that decline and launching palmistry's nineteenth century revival, precisely because d'Arpentigny presented shape-reading in the vocabulary of contemporary natural science rather than of divination, giving educated readers a framework they could take up without embarrassment. His most significant disciple, Adolphe Desbarrolles, extended and popularized the system in the following decades, merging d'Arpentigny's hand-shape typology with a reworked and more systematic treatment of the palm's lines, and it is this combined Desbarrolles-d'Arpentigny synthesis, rather than either man's work alone, that underlies most Western palmistry as it is practiced today, including the terminology, the mount of Venus, the line of the heart, the line of the head, still used by contemporary palm readers.
D'Arpentigny's original shape typology remains a distinct diagnostic layer within that later synthesis, still taught as chirognomy proper, meaning the study of the hand's shape, as distinct from chiromancy, the study of its lines, a distinction that survives in palmistry manuals today as a direct legacy of his 1839 treatise.