I love this painting at the Met. I know nothing about Georges de La Tour. I do know that this painting was completed sometime around 1630. The reason I love it is that it is a narrative about transgression. Like the writer Patrick Radden Keefe, I think a story is useless unless it involves a crime. (Maybe that's overly dramatic, but it's pretty close to what I think.) A crime involves role-playing--you have to feign being someone you're not, if you want to stage a coverup--and role-playing leads to odd behaviors. I will always have fond memories of "Better Call Saul" because of Kim Wexler. Wexler's criminal ambition takes her farther and farther from "the truth"--then, after a massacre, she has to try to atone for what she has done. Georges de La Tour's "Fortune Teller" has a straightforward story. An elderly woman offers to read a palm. While the "mark" is distracted, a band of thieves gets to work on a pocket-picking mission...