The Bouquet is card number 9 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 bunch of flowers. In the tradition its core sense is a gift, an invitation, beauty and a pleasant surprise; one of the most favourable cards of the deck.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the Queen of Spades, 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 bouquet takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Der Blumenstrauss. As House 9 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on gifts, invitations and small pleasures. In combination, Bouquet followed by Letter reads as a written invitation or a gift accompanying a message, while Bouquet followed by Heart reads as a gift given out of genuine affection rather than mere courtesy. The card is conventionally read as one of the more consistently favourable in the deck, carrying little of the ambivalence attached to cards like Clouds or Mice, and readers often use it to soften a harsher neighbouring card's implication.