Teheuti
The images first appear as a complete set in Nuremberg Germany 1798 as the "Game of Hope." The cards were laid out as a game board and the instructions describe a game of the "Snakes & Ladders" type (related to the Game of Goose). In the corners were playing cards - German-suited on the upper left and the related French-suited on the upper right. The instructions mention that the cards may also be used for fortune-telling (with no further instruction). The playing card designations would allow one to also use the deck for many of the extremely popular games that used only 32 or 36 cards. I would call this deck a multi-purpose one - designed to be used in many different ways.And as I see it if the Lenormand branched off of Playing Cards, am sure I read somewhere Madam Lenormands deck was Playing Cards with symbols drawn all over them
About two years ago I discovered at the British Museum an earlier game of Viennese Coffee-Cards (first published in Vienna around 1794 and soon republished in an English-language edition). These are a set of cards based on standard coffee-ground divination images as described in earlier books. The accompanying book gives divinatory meanings for each card that are almost identical to the meanings given in the original Lenormand instruction sheet (that was published, practically unchanged, with almost every Lenormand deck until the late 20th century).
The card images have no correspondence with the English and French playing card meanings of the card inserts! They do match very closely with 18th-19th century German playing card meanings for the suits of Bells, Acorns, Hearts and Leaves, as recent research has amply shown.