Tarot: Tarot: Spécial Cercle / Tarot Nouveau / Tarot A Jouer / Jeu De Tarot / Bourgeois Tarot (Grimaud)

Tarot: spécial cercle / tarot nouveau / tarot à jouer / jeu de tarot / bourgeois tarot. Grimaud, France. Full playing-tarot deck, French suited, 80 double-headed cards. Size: 60mm x 113mm.

Deck make-up:
Trumps: 1-21.
Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: 1-10, foot jack, mounted jack, queen, king.
Extras: joker, title card (double-sided), points card.

This pattern originated in the late 19th century with the CL Wüst card-maker of Frankfurt, Germany. It has been suggested that the pack was an exasperated response to the increasing use of tarot decks for fortune-telling purposes. This deck contains none of the usual Renaissance illustrations (hanged man, wheel of fortune et al.) on the trumps, which were perceived to distract players.

The deck is a full tarot deck and is thus suitable for playing almost any game requiring a full tarot deck or a stripped tarot deck, so is the "go-to" deck if you want to try tarocchi/tarock games (especially since it features the familiar French suits). It can even be made into a regular poker deck by removing one of the two jacks in each suit, and the suit of trumps. This pack is most commonly found in France, Wallonia, Romandy, Québec, and Denmark. Central Europe has a very similar deck called industrie und glück, but this is usually seen in a stripped version of 54 cards (lacking values one through six in the black suits, and five through ten in the red suits).

Click on any card to explore the design.

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Trumps

Supposedly these trumps (apart from 10 and 11) have an urban/town representation of a given theme when one way up and, when inverted, have a rural/country representation. Here is a table, taken from Wikipedia:

General theme	Card number	Card theme	Urban representation	Rural representation
The four ages	2	Childhood	Children playing in the park	Boys playing at the fête
	3	Youth	Group of youths in the park	Three maidens in town clothes
	4	Maturity	In the office	Women with children
	5	Old Age	Grandfather	Grandmother
The four times of day	6	Morning	Breakfast	Mowing the wheat
	7	Afternoon	Discussion in the parlour	Rest in the field
	8	Evening	Music room	The family reunited on the doorstep
	9	Night	Returning home after hunting	The night watch
The four elements	10	Earth		The mine
	10	Air		Shepherd in the mountains
	11	Water		Boating on the lake
	11	Fire		The picnic
The four leisures	12	Dance	Soirée	Folk dance
	13	Shopping	The store	The village store
	14	Open air	Hunting	Fishing
	15	Visual arts	Photography	Painting
The four seasons	16	Spring	Gardener in the park	Sheep shearing
	17	Summer	At the races	Drying the wheat
	18	Autumn	At the market	Threshing wheat
	19	Winter	Skating	The vigil
The game	20	The game	Cards	Bowling
Folly	21	Collective	The carnival	The military parade
Folly	1	Individual	The sad clown	The fool and the ballerina

It seems to me that the table's entry for 5 is the wrong way round (the grandfather picture looks more rural than the grandmother). Ditto for 9 (isn't hunting more rural than a nightwatchman?) Both pictures on 11 look more like town types to me. Ditto 21. Ditto 1.
I also think that 3 could just as easily be the other way round. Also, I think the guy sitting down on 10 is probably a goatherd rather than a shepherd. And what does "The vigil" on 19 mean?
Note also the weird appearance by the fool in the army scene on card 21.

Hearts

The corner indices on the courts are French: V – valet, C – chevalier (knight), D – dame (Lady, rather than reine for queen as then the initial would clash with the king), R – roi (king).

Clubs

As with most decks of cards, early versions lacked the corner indices of later editions. It seems the basic design was not resized when the indices were added, hence the pip symbols have ended up chopped in half to make room for the indices.

Diamonds

The names the French use for these suits do not correspond exactly with the English names. The diamonds here are carreaux (tiles). Hearts are cœurs (same as the English). Clubs are trèfles (clovers / trefoils); the English having, for some reason, used a name pulled from their Mediterranean-suited predecessors (one style of which looked like cudgels / clubs) despite the mismatch between the symbol and the name...

Spades

... As for spades, this time the French have a mismatch, too. In French, this suit is piques (pikes) despite the symbol looking like a leaf; the French name also seems to have been derived from a Mediterranean suit (that of swords).