The Maker
The Jack of Clubs bears the imprint of the manufactuer "P. Marc" along with "G.D. Paris", while the rest of the court cards have only "Marc" at the foot of the full-length illustration. The Jack of Clubs also shows his printing device, suitably the 'Marc d'Or', which was registered in the 1770s.
The Cards
This rare deck of pre-Revolution French playing cards follows the standard design conceived in Paris during the seventeenth century, with plain pip cards whose value is represented by the number of suit symbols, and court cards representing figures from history, legend and scripture:
Clubs - Alexander, Argine, Marc
Diamonds - Caesar, Rachel, Hector
Hearts - Charlemagne, Judith, La Hire
Spades - David, Pallas, Hogier
Appropriately, the Marc found on the Jack of Clubs in the original Paris design here doubles as a reference to the card-maker. 'Argine' on the Queen of Clubs is simply an anagram of the Latin word 'regina', meaning 'queen'. Hogier on the Jack of Spades is a reference to Holger the Dane, first mentioned in the 'Chanson de Roland' as a Danist antagonist of Charlemagne's, while La Hire on the Jack of Hearts is the nickname of the French military commander, Étienne de Vignolles, Sieur de Montmorillon, Chatelain de Longueville, whose full name and title may not have fit on the card!

The Revolution was a period of fluctuation after the banning of representing royal emblems and all reminders of the monarchy. On occasion, playing cards from this era were reinvented towards educational purposes through stencilling on the versos with letters, phonemics, denotations, numbers, and punctuation marks.

The versos of these particular cards show parts of, or full, words in French and Latin that seem to have been designed to form a separate game concerning grammar and spelling. Abbreviations on some cards, such as "v[erbe] neut[re]" and "pr[onom] dém[onstratif]" indicate that the players, probably children, were required to match up the Latin vocabulary with the corresponding grammatical form.