Definition of "carte"

"He only says she is Laura Somerset, and he sends me her carte; here it is." Now this was in the early days of cartes, and the soft ivory finish and delicate tinting of the cartes that now are taken, were unknown.

1869, Emma Jane Worboise, “Confidences”, in The Fortunes of Cyril Denham, London: James Clarke & Co., […]; Hodder & Stoughton, […], page 258

Celebrity cartes, and photographic portraits more generally, were valued in Victorian culture for their much-lauded ability to render the sitter as he or she really was.

2013, C. Boyce, P. Finnerty, A. Millim, Victorian Celebrity Culture and Tennyson's Circle

We’ll take a dram for luck, and as soon as this handless man of mine has the collops ready, we’ll dine and take a hand at the cartes as gentlemen should.

1886 May 1 – July 31, Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped, being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: […], London, Paris: Cassell & Company, published 1886

He had been to the supper of the Forest Club at the Cross Keys in Gledsmuir, a clamjamphry of wild young blades who passed the wine and played at cartes once a fortnight.

1902 January, John Buchan, “The Outgoing of the Tide”, in The Watcher by the Threshold, and Other Tales, Edinburgh, London: William Blackwood and Sons, published 1902, page 242