Sunday Pages: "Les Prophéties"

A book of quatrains by Nostradamus

Dear Reader,

The second week of June 2002 found us in the south of France. After spending the first view days of our honeymoon in Paris, catching up on sleep, fighting through the mosh pit in front of the Mona Lisa, being blown away by the Eiffel Tower (the magnificence of which no postcard could possibly convey), and drinking copious amounts of vin rouge, we took the train to Avignon, hired a reluctant taxi, and made our way to a little village, as old as it was delightful, called Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

We were staying at a placed called Maison du Village, an enormous country house—also old, also delightful—that had been converted into what was technically, but only technically, a bed and breakfast. I chose it because it was 500 years old and teeming with the ancient charm of the ancien régime, and also because it was feline friendly. The estate was home to any number of cats, who had the run of the place—one of them was called Bowie, because, like the late rock star, his eyes were of two different colors—and I knew that after a week in Europe, we would be missing our own cats.

The maison was a massive structure, even by today’s standards, and in the sixteenth century must have seemed Versailles-like (although Versailles, of course, would not be built for another 150 years). It was nestled far beyond the road, and we drove to it by way of a long, arrow-straight driveway lined, as in some movie scene, by towering trees that may as well have been beefeaters standing at attention.

The plan was to get situated at the house and then get something to eat, as we were both ravenous. But while the Maison du Village is indeed within walking distance of the town, it’s a good mile and a half away, and none of the restaurants in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence were open because it was three o’clock in the afternoon—including the one attached to the Maison du Village. This predicament we explained to the proprietress, who took pity on our honeymoon plight, repaired to the kitchen, and returned with two sandwiches—ham, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and butter, on baguettes—and a ceramic pitcher of chilled red wine. The combination of our intense faim, the mild panic about lack of provisions, and the astonishing quality of the food and drink that appeared as if my magic was beyond description. Twenty-two-and-a-half years later, that remains the best single meal I’ve ever had in my life.

The lone claim to fame of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence is that it was the birthplace of Michel de Nôtredame, better known by his Latinized nom de plume, Nostradamus. The Maison du Village, in fact, was said to have belonged to one of Michel’s brothers. We had a running joke that instead of seeing visions of the future, this brother could only see visions of the past. (“Remember last Yuletide? Yeah, that was nice.”) This was, I’ll allow, more concept-funny than ha-ha funny.

Nostradamus sounds like a character from some fantastical work of fiction. Perhaps he is a talking rat in an animated tale, or a 36th-level magic-user that haunts some Dungeons & Dragons module, or an eccentric rich occultist who owns his own island, like Maurice Conchis in The Magus. He does not sound like a real person, and, unlike most historical figures at his level of fame, I could not have told you, even two days ago, during which century he lived. But live Michel de Nôtredame did, without question: from his December 1503 birth in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence to his death, 62 years later, in Salon-de-Provence, some 40 kilometers away.

I tend to think of the sixteenth century as a sort of isthmus connecting the Olden Days to the Modern Times. The six decades Nostradamus walked the earth comprised an incredible period of rapid societal, cultural, religious, and geopolitical change. Gutenberg had invented the moveable-type printing press in the 1440s, so by the time Michel was old enough to read, books were available. Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the Wittenberg church in 1517, firing off the starter pistol that began the Protestant Reformation. Magellan, who led the first expedition that circumnavigated the globe, set sail in 1519—the same year the conquistador Hernán Cortés began his war on the Aztecs and the same year that François I of France acquired the aforementioned Mona Lisa after the death of Leonardo da Vinci, of whom he was a patron. Copernicus reimagined the celestial order in On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543. And so on.

Nôtredame’s life was not a particularly happy one. Pestilence and plague followed him everywhere. His studies at Avignon ended abruptly when the university shut down during a pandemic. He was initially expelled from medical school at Montpelier for working as an apothecary—dispensing cures to the sick. He married in 1531, and had two children, only for his entire family to be wiped out by plague in 1534. After finishing his medical studies, he practiced in Toulouse, in the heart of Languedoc, itself the heart of gnosticism. He married again and had six children. In Aix, he gained notoriety as a physician for successfully treating plague-riddled patients, and is said to have developed some kind of herbal remedy to ward off the disease. (For all his exposure to plague, Nôtredame never suffered from it, so maybe he was onto something.)

Michel believed, not without some reason, that there was a relationship between medicine and astrology. This is less cuckoo that it sounds; herbs achieve peak potency at certain times during the year, and Nôtredame thought that the calendar/remedy dynamic demanded more study. This led him, in 1550, to lean into his early interest in the celestial bodies, performed under the tutelage of his brilliant grandfather, and publish an almanac. This is what initially made his name.

Michel de Nôtredame then became interested in the occult. It was during this phase of his life, halfway through the topsy-turvy sixteenth century, that he began having visions. He wrote down what he saw in cryptical quatrains—four-line rhyming poems with A/B/A/B structure. Les Prophéties, the fruit of this prognosticatorial labor, consists of ten sets, or “Centuries” as he called them, of 100 quatrains. It was with the publication of these books of enigmatical verse, in 1555, that “Nostradamus” was born.

The cockamamie idea of Nostradamus being gifted with foresight was cemented when Quatrain 35 of Century I seemed to predict the death of King Henri II, which makes perfect sense if you think this

Le Lyon jeune, le vieux surmontera,
En champ bellique par singuliere duelle,
Dans cage d'or les yeux luy creuera,
Deux classes vne, pour mourir mort cruelle.

The young lion will overcome the older one,
In a field of combat in single fight:
He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage;
Two wounds in one, then he dies a cruel death.

explicitly refers to the young French king dying after being accidentally wounded in a jousting match. Even so, prominent Frenchmen bought into the hype—enough so that even the rich and powerful nobility like Catherine de Medici regarded him as some sort of Provençal oracle. Absolument Nostradamus believed himself to be a prophet. And he looked the part. With his Brooklyn hipster beard and piercing eyes, he was a proto-Rasputin.

My French is not good enough to remark on the quality of his poetry, but I don’t know that anyone reads Nostradamus for his literary value. The pleasure of the quatrains lies in finding one that seems to accurately predict our present moment—although, for every relevant quatrain, there are 98 that could mean anything or nothing. This one is typical:

When twenty years of the Moon’s reign have passed,
Another will take up his reign for seven thousand years.
When the exhausted Sun takes up his cycle,
Then my prophecy and threats will be accomplished.

Like, okay, great, thanks for the heads-up, Mike!

My freshman year at Georgetown, there was a rumor that one of Nostradamus’s prophesies concerned something that was going to happen 1) on Halloween 1991, and 2) on campus:

He will find himself shut in between two rivers,
Casks and barrels joined to cross beyond:
Eight bridges broken, their chief run through so many times,
Perfect children’s throats slit by the knife.

How on earth did this refer to Georgetown, or Halloween, or 1991? Your guess is as good as mine. I wrote a parody of “Sounds of Silence” about this, which my friend Gates and I sang on opening night of a musical we were doing, on the date in question. It ended like this:

And the murderous chief with the death blade never came.
How lame.
So much for Noooooooo….stra-dam-us.

Needless to say, no one’s throats were slit by a knife, and the Key Bridge remained intact.

But sometimes, like the proverbial broken clock, Nostradamus tells the time correctly. This quatrain is pretty clearly a vision of the United States, where we celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday:

From the three water signs will be born
One who makes Thursday his holiday.
His renown, praise, rule and power will grow
On land and sea, bringing trouble to the East.

I have a slender Avenel Books edition of the Nostradamus prophesies, published in 1980, much abridged. I was flipping through it a few weeks ago in bed, to make myself more sleepy. Beneath each quatrain, in brackets, is what the prophesy is said to mean: [D-Day, World War II?] [The Jews founding Israel despite British indifference?] [Roberts sees chemical warfare] [Leoni sees Spanish or U.S. popes or H-bombs!] Retrofitting ancient cryptic prophesies to modern events is endlessly entertaining, and perfectly meaningless, and wonderfully unrelated to our slow descent into fascism.

But then I ran into one that gave me pause:

VIII. 20

Le faux message par election fainte
Courir par vrben rompuë pache arreste,
Voix aceptées, de sang chapelle tainte,
Et à vn autre l'empire contraincte.

False message about the rigged election
Runs through the city, stopping the broken pact;
Voices bought, chapel stained with blood,
To another, the empire constrains.

As I don’t need to point out, Nostradamus seems to be talking about the here and now. “False message about a rigged election” is easily read as a reference to Trump’s “Stop the Steal” messaging. “The city” is the internet. “Voices bought” are the chaos agents paid for by the Kremlin to flood the zone with disinformation. The “chapel” is the Capitol. “The empire constrains” is the weakening of the United States that is a result of this. In other translations, the last line is “the empire goes to another,” meaning someone undeserving of the honor, meaning Donald.

The next quatrain continues this theme:

Three foists will enter the port of Agde
Carrying the infection and pestilence of bad faith.
Passing the bridge they will carry off a million,
The bridge is broken by the resistance of a third.

The interpretation of this quatrain, in a 1947 edition I found online, is: “Agda, a city in France, shall be the entering point for foreign propaganda, eventually conquering the country thereby.”

Foreign propaganda? Successfully conquering a country?

Oh, and in his epistle to Henri II, Nostradamus makes this prediction:

A great place will be established, with union and concord between some of the children of opposite ideas, who have been separated by diverse realms. And such will be the peace that the instigator and promoter of military factions, born of the diversity of religions, will remain chained to the deepest pit. And the kingdom of the Furious One, who counterfeits the sage, will be united.

The countries, towns, cities, realms and provinces which will have abandoned their old customs to gain liberty, but which will in fact have enthralled themselves even more, will secretly have wearied of their liberty. Faith lost in their perfect religion, they will begin to strike to the left, only to return to the right.

Secretly wearied of their liberty? Return to the right? Comment dit-on “Yikes?”

It’s all bunk, of course. Nostradamus probably ingested a few too many of the wild mushrooms he was harvesting up in the mountains, and if he were alive today, he’d be picking football games on gambling podcasts, or predicting elections for Le Figaro, or producing some occult Netflix show.

Even so, there is comfort in prophesies, even baleful ones, because prophesies absolve us of complicity in the machinations of life. Who are we to resist outcomes already carved in stone? What hope is there for us, if all endings are predetermined? If nothing can be changed, why not just accept our lot and take solace in the fact that all things are beyond our control?

That fatidic comfort, I think, explains the appeal of organized religion. Deus ex machina is a beautiful thing. How blissful it must be, to believe absolutely that some divine entity is coming to save us! Or, for that matter, that we are capable of—or worth—being saved!

On our second and last night at the Maison du Village, we made the half-hour walk into Saint-Rémy-de-Provence for dinner. We strolled down the long driveway, shaded by the tall trees. We passed an enclosure where there were some dogs lying lazily in the afternoon sun. And we walked by field and field of lavender, of which the summer air was redolent.

It was June, and we were farther north than we were used to, and I had observed that the sky didn’t get really dark until about 10:30. So we enjoyed our dinner, and we had some wine, and then dessert, and then more wine. There were no cabs to be found, so we began to walk back around ten.

As it turns out, I had miscalculated the time of the nightfall. We were only halfway back to the house when it suddenly got very, very dark. This was long before mobile phones came with flashlights, so there was no way of lighting our path. We clung to each other in the gloaming and doubled our pace, hoping that we would get to the driveway before the darkness swallowed us up completely.

The fields of lavender turned to black. There wasn’t a living soul anywhere near us. And we were terrified—we, who lived in New York City, and regularly and fearlessly made journeys on foot more objectively dangerous than this.

At the turn into the driveway, the dogs in the enclosure came to life. They were barking at us ferociously, their yellow eyes gleaming in the moonlight, chilling us to the bone. Horror movie stuff.

We practically ran the rest of the way, down the long dark drive, even the stars hidden from view by the shadowy treetops—the same path Nostradamus himself had likely taken, almost five centuries before: Nostradamus, who trusted that the sun would always rise the next day on those redolent fields of lavender, and who could glimpse the future well enough to know not to be afraid of the dark.

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ICYMI

Great episode of The Five 8, with Molly McKew:

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Photo credit: The Portrait of Michel de Nostredame (Nostradamus), a French Renaissance Medicine & Astrologer, painted by his son César de Nostredame (1553-1630?)