A little shop that we often visit is Tumbleweed on the rue de Turenne. As its name suggests, it is owned by an American. The tiny boutique features everything from puzzles to children’s shoes to wonderful bags printed with images of Paris shopfronts.

We bought one of the bags as a gift for a friend. The young woman behind the counter wrapped it for us in paper printed with what at first looked like playing cards. However, a closer look revealed that the images were of odd-looking 19th-century characters, and each card had a question or a bit of dialogue written on it. The shop assistant told us they were “devinettes d’Épinal.”

Devinettes are guessing games or riddles. Each card contains a hidden image, and the question is a prompt to find a face or an animal hidden in the image. Here’s an example. The card says, “Find the rabbit?”
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