The Mice is card number 23 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 mice or rats. In the tradition its core sense is loss, worry and gradual erosion; the card gnaws at whatever sits beside it, wearing a matter down over time.
Like every card in the deck it also carries an inset playing card, here the 7 of Clubs, 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 mice takes much of its final meaning from its neighbours in the line or the Grand Tableau.
In the original German tradition the card is Die Maeuse. As House 23 in the Grand Tableau, any card landing in that numbered position is read as touching on gradual loss, erosion or worry that wears something down over time rather than a single sudden event. In combination, Mice followed by Fish reads as a slow financial drain or money quietly disappearing, while Mice preceding Heart reads as a relationship being slowly eroded by unresolved worry. The card's small, numerous figures are conventionally read as marking a problem's cumulative, nibbling character rather than any single decisive cause.