Les Mysteres de la Main organized the palm's lines into a symbolic vocabulary, the lines of life, head, heart and fate among them, each read for length, depth, breaks and crossings said to indicate character traits and life events, building on and greatly expanding older European chiromantic tradition rather than inventing its basic elements from nothing. Desbarrolles is often described as the father of modern chiromancy specifically because of how thoroughly his systematization and popular presentation superseded the fragmentary manuscript tradition that came before him.
His books, translated into English within a generation of his death, were a direct and heavily used source for the late Victorian palmistry boom associated with writers such as Cheiro and Ed Heron-Allen, whose own popular manuals openly built on the combined d'Arpentigny-Desbarrolles system. As with palmistry generally, no controlled study has validated hand reading as a means of predicting character or events; the atlas records Desbarrolles's work as the historically foundational text of modern line based palmistry that it is.
The book's repeated revisions carried Desbarrolles' reputation well past his own death in 1886: publishers kept Les Mysteres de la Main in print into the early twentieth century, and its illustrated plates of palm lines and mounts were reproduced, credited and uncredited alike, in a long line of later popular manuals, making it one of the most directly reused single sources in the history of Western palmistry publishing.