“[Victor-Émile] Michelet says Paul Adam was one of the three or four minds of the Symbolist generation who really grasped what a symbol was and could thereby vivify his work with that perception; the others apparently only acceded to the 'threshold of allegory.' Adam swam deep into 'the oceans of gnostic intellectuality' and knew how to penetrate beyond appearances. 

“'Possessed of prophetic powers, Adam could read into the subterranean wefts beyond nature on 'which were embroidered the events of 1914 and the following years.' That is to say, he predicted World War I and subsequent events. 

“Paul Adam constructed his stories, the lives of his characters, the twists and turns of his dramas that link them into logical sequence, on the tarot. His dramas are the eruptions of invisible reality, symbolized by any manner of combination of the tarot’s seventy-eight cards. And if this all sounds implausible, Michelet reproduced a letter in his Companions of the Hierophany in which, in the most charming French prose, Adam congratulated Michelet on having penetrated his secret: that yes, the tarot had been for him a constructive key, indispensable to a 'thousand intutitions': 'I remain a docile disciple having received the highest recompense of his zeal, that of your approbation. Paul Adam. June 1919.'”

Tobias Churton, 2016