Les Mysteres de la Main

Adolphe Desbarrolles's nineteenth-century text is the tradition's own primary statement of a palmistry system, not independent scholarship, and this record describes it as such rather than as an outside verified account: it sets out one nineteenth-century French practitioner's own scheme of hand mounts, lines and fingers, a system later popular palmistry still references but that carries no outside verification that hand shape or lines actually predict character or fate. Its value here is narrowly as the documented origin of this specific historical system, checkable against the text itself, not as evidence the system is ancient, universally standard, or empirically supported. Use it for the content of Desbarrolles's own palmistry system as he presented it; it is not evidence that palmistry accurately reads character, a claim this primary source does not itself attempt to establish independently.