Chapter 8

A World of One’s Own

The pseudoprophet from Aix was outlandish and perhaps mentally disturbed. Other Nostradamus aficionados fit this profile between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, but most of the people whom I have encountered in the course of my research were ordinary folk. A French lawyer wrote commentaries on Nostredame’s “magnificent verse” in the late sixteenth century. A self-taught secretary mulled over a prediction about a flood in Grenoble as he traveled across France in the 1730s. And more than a century later, a well-read American grandmother owned a copy of the Prophecies with “stained and ragged pages that rustled as one turned them.” These people seem perfectly sane.¹

To figure out why Nostradamus endured across the centuries, we must understand why all kinds of people paid attention to these predictions, whether they trusted the man’s predictive abilities or not. We have already encountered some of these readers, but from afar, in the shadows of media and Nostradamian providers. What we have not done is watch and listen in earnest as they grappled with these dark, cryptic words. We have not entered their homes, read over their shoulders, opened their journals, intercepted their letters, eavesdropped on their conversations, or watched them respond to major crises. Doing so is not easy. Exceptional sentiments and occurrences often leave long archival trails whereas indifference goes unrecorded. Illiterate folk are by definition elusive. And the words that historical actors used to describe their emotions do not always express what they truly felt.²

Still, it is worth a try. Drawing from history and sociology, we can recover the norms that allowed people to parse the quatrains and the expectations that invited them to do so. When evidence proves frail, we can cautiously extrapolate and pay attention, not just to what people said but also to what they did with Nostradamus. We can also derive insights from behavioral psychology, although this requires a soft approach. Successive generations are unlikely to experience similar situations or to register and record their emotions in identical ways. Social forces filter what happens in the body and the psyche. It is nonetheless conceivable that, while emotional frameworks change, some social expectations and behavioral patterns endure or go through gradual evolutions. Even though the field of social neuroscience, which traces the relationship between neural mechanisms and psychological or social processes, is still in its infancy, many scholars agree that brain modules change little over a few hundred years. Without explaining everything (or suggesting that biology determines all), pychology may provide us with something as we seek to understand what Europeans made of these predictions.³

What, then, did Nostradamus mean during these centuries? The short answer is that the words that encompassed the world in all of its dimensions, the words that were secular and yet sometimes imbued with religious awe, the words that escaped exclusive ownership by any creed or party also lent themselves to several relationships at once. In fact, the men and women who encountered Nostradamus tend to fall into four families: decoders, awed beholders, persons of leisure, and ambivalent readers. We will meet the first three below and the fourth one in the following chapter.

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Plenty of readers were distracted in early modern Europe, but some pored over Nostredame’s predictions with sharp-eyed focus. They delved into this mystifying text and then furnished the meaning and coherence that were not always apparent. Take the 116-page interpretation of the Prophecies held in Lyon’s public library. The anonymous, undated manuscript is ungainly, brittle, and partially eaten by rats. But it is important, for it shows that some individuals read Nostradamus with seriousness of purpose. Its author was clearly literate and well educated, most probably a male humanist from Lyon. He began his commentary in the mid-1550s and kept adding to it for years or even decades. He selected dozens of quatrains, copied each one at the top of a page, and then wrote several paragraphs of explanation below. His goal was to extricate the single meaning that, he was convinced, lay hidden within each quatrain. He thus scrutinized lines to explain what each one “meant to say.” The task must have taken him considerable time, perhaps whole days or evenings. Each of this humanist’s mini-essays received a title and each one pertained to geopolitics, most often the Turkish threat. The “great city” in one quatrain, he wrote, referred to Constantinople. Other quatrains foretold the fall of Tunis in 1638, or the death of a leading sultan in 1640. Again and again, the author concluded that Nostredame had predicted the demise of an Arab or Turkish leader. France may have allied itself with the Turks in the 1520s, but he still concluded that Christendom would vanquish its enemy from the east.⁴

This humanist was an active reader, an interpreter, a translator from an arcane language. One thinks of the counsel that another such reader, the English gentleman William Drake, imparted a century later: “When you read, do it earnestly, gathering together all the power of your mind to the study thereof, neither let your mind wander.” Our Lyon humanist never specified what technique he used. This was unnecessary. The quatrains’s freedom from institutions and traditions meant that he could interpret them in whatever way he wished. No conditionals or hedging here. Writing in confident, declarative prose, he trusted his ability to unravel a high-stakes mystery. When lines proved opaque, he made the indispensable connections and supplied names and dates. His relationship to Nostradamus rested on a dynamic interplay between words and readers. The former guide and orient; the latter follow these guidelines while imprinting their own direction. Sometimes, this active reading entailed writing. Like modern-day cognitive psychologists, humanists understood that there was no more efficient way of assimilating complex ideas. They accordingly filled the books they read with symbols and abbreviations. Some of them also jotted down thoughts and excerpts from their readings in journals that were called commonplace books. They did so to sharpen their judgment, advance their education, create a bank for future use, and accumulate memories. One Venetian nobleman copied four Nostradamus quatrains in his commonplace book alongside drawings of constellations and considerations on the rise and fall of empires. Readers who annotated, corrected, translated, and rearranged excerpts were free and creative, critical and assertive. They conversed with the words and their author.⁵

Some works lend themselves to active reading better than others. This is true of the Bible, for instance. People could read bits and pieces and make connections between passages and books. Many Bibles handed down to us from the early modern period contain annotations, cross references, and commentaries. Still, the Roman Catholic Church sought to prevent unsupervised access. This was not the case with the inviting Nostradamus. The cornucopia of words, metaphors, and inversions transcends place and time; the discontinuous story lines lack a plot; and the colons separate clauses that relate to one another in all kinds of potential ways. A high-ranking official will be rebuked; temples will be desecrated. Such statements beg for elucidation. Everything is up for grabs in a realm that bridges the true, the plausible, and the conceivable. This universe seems foreign, but the vivid images, the familiar places, the words that most readers had already encountered also provide points of entry. The quatrains are not blank—and hence utterly disorienting, overly demanding of readers who have to do the heavy lifting. Nor are they closed off, constrained by limited horizons, arcane references, and the single connotations of subject-verb-complement sentences. Instead, they provide a vista for reason and imagination.⁶

So does the disjointed nature of Nostradamus’s predictions. The presages that he inserted in his almanacs floated on their own. In the Prophecies, connections between quatrains were at best loose or veiled. The following musings by the French writer Paul Valéry about Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time are oddly pertinent: “The interest of his work lies in each fragment. We can open the book wherever we choose; its vitality does not depend on what went before.” It was so easy to peruse the quatrains closely though not exhaustively, to consider each one as a stand-alone piece, and then to read it in isolation or else in a sequence of one’s own devising.⁷

Nostredame’s self-presentation as an inspired human being, rather than the equal of biblical prophets, invited such readings. So did his claims that he lacked the words to express what laid in store, or that he had written but one-hundredth of what he knew: “More things will take place than I have mentioned.” He all but dared readers to fill in the blanks. It is not so much that his vague predictions could mean anything. This is true, but then what? It is rather that they became a personal palimpsest, a call to explore, map out, and reconcile one’s internal world, the world in which one lived, and the universe that he offered for consumption. To decode the quatrains was to bring together what the historian Anthony Grafton, speaking of astrology, calls the local and the ephemeral: the workings of the universe and those of inner lives.⁸

One of the most forceful arguments for the appeal of divination is that it provides stability and order. This vast cognitive scheme encompasses nature and history, time and destiny, religion and politics. If unexpected events fit within a structured plan, then all is not haphazard. Some scholars hold that people in precarious situations are readier than others to substitute benevolent forces for the vagaries of chance or the deficiencies of reason. Insight into mysterious forces overcomes feelings of aimlessness. Divination thus delivers solace and comfort. True enough, but all kinds of things can bring solace and comfort. We also need to consider the ways divination has helped people make their world meaningful.⁹

Nostradamus provided a coherent framework beneath the surface of the words. Readers had to dig in. The Lyon humanist who parsed quatreins relished this opportunity. Endowed with what psychologists call an internal locus of control, he believed in his own ability to uncover patterns and imprint meaning. Having mastered the text, he could now do the same with the broader world and his own existence. For centuries, people have searched for the hidden and unique signification of Nostradamus’s predictions. Those who believe that there is such a thing may derive satisfaction from bringing it to light and hence showing that nothing is utterly incomprehensible. Having fathomed Nostradamus, one can also fathom deeper mysteries. But let us also consider the idea that the reader who felt that she had decoded Nostradamus, or made inroads in that direction, could derive confidence in her broader interpretative abilities. Grappling with the predictions—this open-ended activity—could prove as meaningful as the final result. Nostradamus’s semi-opacity may have led our humanist to relive a character-building journey toward contemplation of a broader order, be it cosmic or other. Decoding can be a way of existing in the world.¹⁰

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Active reading persisted after the Renaissance. French almanacs commonly included blank pages for readers to write comments, relate events that they had witnessed, or even list purchases. Many publishers of the Prophecies likewise encouraged readers to determine for themselves what Nostredame had meant to say. “Whoever will apply himself in the reading of this book,” one of them explained in 1667, “will be able to discover many more predictions that I have not indicated here.” Chavigny ordered and interpreted key predictions but also conceded that he could not explain all of them. Readers with deeper insight should share them frankly, he said. In the late seventeenth century, English pamphleteers invited readers to assess the quality of their interpretations. Sometimes, they even allowed these readers to take over. Quatrain 2.49’s references to counselors, conquerors, and the skies of Rhodes proved too perplexing for the translator Garencières in 1672. “I had rather leave it to the liberty of the Reader, than break my Brains about it,” he wrote, “considering chiefly that I am going to bed, the precedent Stanza having exhausted all my Spirits.”¹¹

Numerous readers accepted such invitations. Most of them were educated and wealthy and had sufficient leisure time (although some individuals of lower status also engaged in such reading but without leaving as many traces). The distinguished Godefroy family provides a telling example in seventeenth-century France. The patriarch Théodore, a learned humanist and royal historiographer to Louis XIII, was sober in his religiosity and skeptical regarding astrology and Nostradamus. His two sons, however, were deeply interested in theology and the Prophecies. Denys II, who presided over a sovereign court in the city of Lille in northern France, collected transcriptions of sermons, including one that compared Nostradamus’s and Joachim of Fiore’s predictions regarding the Jesuit destruction of Rome. He also analyzed chosen quatrains line by line. Quatrain 7.43, for instance, depicted a prominent prince’s recent flight from the French court in 1662. “The laughing nephew should flee.” Denys II’s brother Léon, a canon in southwestern France, quoted quatrains in his travel journals and linked them to local floods and other events. Each in his own way, the two brothers fashioned their own meaning out of Nostradamian words.¹²

Several surviving editions of the Prophecies from this era likewise contain underlined words, marginal annotations (wobbly lines, parentheses, crosses), boxes around selected quatrains, and impromptu clarifications. Next to the line “The child is born with two teeth in its throat” (quatrain 3.42), one reader penciled “the King” in a 1667 edition. Some contemporaries also kept notebooks with “explanations” of Nostradamian verses regarding the years or decades to come. One of them, by a member of an eminent Avignon family, identified quatrains and sixains about the English Revolution, the Spanish Succession, and the royal house of France. The author then added a section of “strange and extraordinary things that must happen in the century that began in the year 1689.” A century later, Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stuart prince who was exiled to Rome in the 1740s, reportedly combed the Centuries for indications that he would accede to the throne of his ancestors. Few readers expected to find explicit references to their personal lot in the Prophecies, but most, like the prince, pondered the fate of leaders and nations. The decoder sometimes became a soothsayer.¹³

While active reading was often private, it could also lead to shared and even public experiences. Nothing suggests that the Lyon humanist intended to publish his musings or grant them a public function, say, as a warning. But he may have shown his manuscript to friends, colleagues, or family members and then discussed it with them. Books circulated as gifts, loans, and exchanges among early modern readers. When the lord Picot de Gouberville lent a military officer one of Nostradamus’s prognostications in 1562, he asked for a receipt. He wanted it back. There is a good chance that the two men compared impressions. Gentlemen (and some ladies) swapped books and opinions with pleasure during the ensuing centuries. In 1659, an English traveler to France told an eminent friend that the (spurious) line “The heirs of the toads will take Sara” referred to France’s recent seizure of Arras. The toad had been part of the French coat of arms, while ‘sara’ was ‘Arras’ read backward. During the 1720s and 1730s, two French magistrates discussed chosen quatrains on several occasions, speculating on the identity of the future queen of France and the ruler of the Florentine throne. Neither magistrate was fully convinced by these predictions, but neither one dismissed them either as they debated the meaning and validity of given quatrains. “Is it not clear as day?” one of them once asked the other after linking verses to a legal case. Regardless of the answer, Nostradamus’s predictions lent themselves equally well to joint extrapolations and to private meditation.¹⁴

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What some people found bewildering and intriguing, however, others deemed bewildering and alienating. Decoding could constitute an undue burden for individuals who lacked the education, desire, or self-confidence to decipher predictions—and make sense of their world—on their own. This was truer yet for those who believed that a single key unlocked Nostradamus’s enigmas but could not easily discern it. One response was to step back and simply behold what Nostradamus had to offer without seeking to disentangle it. The meandering centuries, the convoluted lines and prophetic strands, the growing uncertainty around the man, the aura that each crisis magnified—all of this invited readers to enter Nostradamus’s universe and accept its covert designs. If anything, Nostradamian providers would crack the code and lead the way. Problem solving is sometimes a lure, but it can also fade behind awe or communion with religious or simply inspiring forces that are greater than oneself.¹⁵

There are different ways of considering this. Intense stress or even trauma can provoke such levels of anxiety that some people become overwhelmed by stimuli and end up all but paralyzed. Psychiatrists speak of catatonic reactions, which block out affective responses and lead people to abandon initiatve and surrender to existing conditions. From this perspective, Nostradamus’s arcane words could contribute to or exacerbate feelings of resignation by displaying all too visibly what lay beyond one’s reach. Social critics have likewise accused astrologers of fostering what they call an ideology of dependence and obedience. Accepting external authority—a grandiose framework that escapes understanding—replaces independent, critical thought. This is one perspective on the matter, and it packs a punch. But something else could have been going on. Individuals with an external locus believe more readily that outside forces govern their existence. They become less anxious once they relinquish control to a stable entity that seems better equipped to achieve a hoped-for outcome. This handover does not call upon them to abandon self-determination or civic rights (though this can sometimes happen). In emotional terms, some people simply find that the best or sole means of exerting control is to give it up, most often temporarily. Nostradamus thus granted the reader permission to deflect responsibility and stop fighting on her own.¹⁶

It also provided a framework according to which the world made sense. Nostradamus’s impenetrability could itself convey something important. The historian Stuart Clark put his finger on it while discussing the French countryside prior to the French Revolution. “Nature was not mysterious to peasants because it was unintelligible to them,” he advanced. “If it was mysterious this was precisely because it was intelligible in terms of a language of mystery.” Extended to Nostradamus, the insight draws attention to a language whose very inscrutability, whose lack of discernible meaning could mirror and help people come to terms with broader disruptions. It could fulfill a deeper craving for mysteries. It could also take over when people saw or felt something that was so disconcerting about their own fate or broader events that they could not process it. The same is true of Nostradamus’s glum pronouncements. They speak to a pessimistic outlook that faced a disordered world with a triple conviction. Fate lies beyond human sway. Change does not necessarily mean progress. And the best course of action is to reduce expectations and find a way of living with one’s troubles.¹⁷

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Collective crises are a case apart. Mysterious forces and glimpses into the future resonate for some people in ways that personal responsibility, reason, and even solidarity may not—or not as strongly. Some crises gestate slowly. Expectations fill the air. Rumors fly. Imagination runs wild. The outbreak then heightens the sense of urgency and disrupts the way people interact with others, perceive state power, or contemplate their future. The locus of control moves easily toward the external pole when events seem to unfold outside one’s sway, when outlets for action hover out of reach, when trusted authorities appear impotent and the established order seems hollow or suspect.

This is one reason why, like astrology or fortune-telling or myths about glorious saviors, Nostradamus has loomed largest during such stretches. “It is above all in times of disorder and revolutions that this desire [for Nostradamus] grows,” one pamphleteer noted in 1849. “During these moments of instability, the spirit, exhausted by doubt, seeks to fathom the future and find some soothing certainty.” That was certainly true of the comte de Moré, a distinguished officer who had served as Lafayette’s aide-de-camp throughout his American campaigns and ended up a political exile during the French Revolution. He opened a bank in Italy and eventually recovered his fortune, but decades later he still struggled to make sense of these painful events. Moré came to believe that Nostradamus’sProphecies alone contained the history of these years. He strung together a series of quatrains in his memoirs and explained that “the only certain thing about this world is that nothing, nothing at all is haphazard, and that there is no effect without a cause.”¹⁸

There were collective crises besides revolutions. In September 1666, a fire broke out in a London bakery and burned across the city for days. It took few lives but destroyed four hundred acres and hundreds of buildings—the entire medieval quarter. The lord mayor’s inability to contain the blaze forced countless Londoners to evacuate in haste and leave their property behind. Among them was Samuel Pepys, the navy secretary, who fled his home in his robe and saw the destruction up close. This was “the saddest sight of desolation,” he wrote in his diary. St. Paul’s Cathedral, much of Fleet Street, the church in which he had been christened, even his father’s house burned down. The fire’s rapid, erratic course suggested that it had been started deliberately. Rumors claimed that English Catholics were about to massacre Protestants while the French invaded. Plots seized the imagination of a population that had lived through a plague epidemic a year earlier and found itself at war against the Dutch. Quakers advocated rebellion; Cromwell’s veterans were poised to take arms. In earlier years, the astrologer William Lilly had foreseen a burning capital by the river while millenarians cautioned that God would punish England for failing to build a New Jerusalem. Why would warnings about the year 1666, with its “Apocalyptic and mysterious number,” not come true?¹⁹

Pepys had thrived during the plague year, quadrupling his fortune and securing two important appointments. “I have never lived so merrily,” he announced at the end of 1665. Few of his diary entries pertained to the disease, as if Pepys were detached from a scourge that was part of the order of things and had somehow spared his family. The Great Fire of London was something else. This “most horrid malicious bloody flame” brought a physical and emotional devastation that seemed to come out of nowhere and last forever. As he walked across the city, Pepys met throngs of distraught Londoners who had suffered great losses. People cried all day, forgot their own names, and sometimes attempted suicide. Pepys’s wife began to lose her hair, and he came down with headaches, stomach pains, and bladder problems. He threw himself into work and extramarital affairs, but this was not enough to shake vivid nighmares about the inferno. Five months after the outbreak, smoke still floated above the city and Pepys still woke up in pain. “It is strange to think how, to this very day,” he wrote in February 1667, “I cannot sleep at night without great terrors of fire, and this very night could not sleep till almost 2 in the morning through thoughts of fire.” He panicked when a neighbor’s chimney caught aflame. A contributor to the British Journal of Psychiatry diagnosed Pepys in 1983 with post-traumatic stress disorder. There is a risk in transposing twentieth-century concepts to earlier periods, but many of the symptoms are certainly present: health problems, flashbacks and anxiety, difficulties concentrating, and feelings of vulnerability before uncontrollable forces.²⁰

That same February, Pepys attended a dinner party at the home of an old friend, the eminent statesman Sir George Carteret. At one point, the conversation veered toward Nostradamus. Carteret recounted the tale of the tomb (it was strange but possibly true, Pepys later noted). Mostly, the guests discussed quatrain 2.51, which was circulating in English almanacs. It seemed to confirm the fire and announce other dire events:

The first two lines are clear enough. Three times twenty (vint & trois) added to six (les six) came out to sixty-six. The “ancient dame” in the third line referred to St. Paul’s. The last line, however, was more troublesome. Some contemporaries insisted that the members of the same sect were worshippers of the sun and planets while others linked them to warring churches. We do not know what was said about these lines around Carteret’s table or how Pepys felt about Nostradamus. After all, he had expressed skepticism about fortune-tellers in earlier years. But innumerable people were now turning to almanacs and the prophecies of Nostradamus and Mother Shipton (“That London in sixty-six should be in ashes”). Dissenters and some Catholics found confirmation that England would finally pay for her sins. While Pepys did not voice such views, this amateur botanist and bibliophile paid attention to a quatrain that he would have dismissed in ordinary times. He contemplated the possibility that it said something meaningful about the events that were making his nights impossible. He remained open to awe, certainty supplanting rumors, and designs underlying catastrophes. Other contemporaries responded similarly. Thomas Tenison, a future archbishop of Canterbury, had derived little edification from Nostradamus in previous years. In the wake of the fire, however, he could not “despise that Stanza of his, which, if it has not satisfied our reason, I’m sure it has astonished the imaginations of many.” Whether or not Nostradamus had truly predicted these events mattered little under the circumstances.²¹

Magical thinking—the belief that magical powers animate the world and that human beings can act upon these powers—prospers when social risks are minimal and the rewards most promising. This is especially true during crises, when norms of behavior change and ordinary safeguards are weakened. One of the reasons why Pepys, Tenison, and others now consulted, accepted, or opened themselves to Nostradamus is that conventions made this acceptable—or, at the very least, they reduced social costs such as embarrassment. The phenomenon’s recurrence in crisis after crisis provided his predictions with a track record, with bona fides as a suitable recourse during such times. Previous generations had turned to his predictions in similar situations and verified the phenomenon. Respectable individuals and media now gave them credence. Consulting the quatrains seemed normal and certainly less problematic than in ordinary times.²²

The rewards were numerous. The long-running phenomenon restored the historical span, the mastery over time, even the routine that this sudden crisis had broken asunder. It could both announce the end of times or, in its constant return, intimate that the present ordeal had had historical equivalents. Humanity had survived before and would do so again. It was not only about the long term, however. Enduring crises also alter, dilute, and compress perceptions of time. Two days after the fire began, Pepys felt as if a week had elapsed. “It is a strange thing to see how long this time did look,” he jotted down. During the French Revolution, too, time changed countenance. It seemed fleeting, evanescent, and all-powerful. This was partly because the revolutionaries stretched out the present and endowed time with creative powers when they launched what they called a new era and set out to ward off the effects of a detestable past. Freed from divine control and the clasp of tradition, time could shape what people thought and did. The revolution’s new calendar would, in the words of the philosopher Condorcet, “put a century of distance between the man of today and that of yesterday.” Time also seemed to change because the pace of events grew so frenetic. People hence sought to pin time down by chronicling its course, explaining its jolts, and anticipating its next steps. With its synthesis of past, present, and future, with its multiple temporal frames (cyclical and eternal, ordered and eschatological, and even linear now—a progression from one crisis to another), Nostradamus structured time while opening it up to whatever outcome would best allay anxieties.²³

Danger lurked everywhere for Pepys, threatening his property, his city, and his country. He felt its physical effects but could not get a handle on it. Anxiety, Freud has taught us, typically operates in this fashion. It is a diffuse state that responds to subjective, often unidentified threats, real or not. Fear, in contrast, revolves around a specific, verified, imminent menace that one can identify. People often find it easier to withstand and sometimes push back against a peril they can name in some way. The Parisian Jewish student Hélène Berr expressed this with startling clarity in 1942: “It’s odd: this confirmation of my dread grants it a foundation, reason and force. Rather than intensifying my anguish, it stabilizes it, removes its mysterious and horrible dimensions, and endows it with sad and bitter certainty.” Perils suffused Nostradamus’s dark universe, but his bank of prophecies could turn anxieties into fears by allowing people to pinpoint their causes, trace their origins, and link them to people and places. In the wake of seemingly unprecedented events, Nostradamus assured contemporaries that they were not prey to mere delusions. Their pain was real and logical given the magnitude of the upheaval, a world historical event that Nostradamus endowed with cold yet glimmering majesty.²⁴

Psychologists have paid considerable attention to the kind of confirmation that Berr describes. Few things, they have found, provoke more anxiety than uncertainty. It prevents people from discerning patterns, adjusting their cognitive framework to a new situation, coming to terms with its consequences, and then charting a course of action. “People feel worse when something bad might occur than when something bad will occur,” advances the psychologist Daniel Gilbert. This might be because the human brain needs to control its environment, either by managing a situation as it unfolds or by preventing the return of unpleasant events. One hypothesis holds that the brain experiences electrical stimuli in different ways depending on its internal state. Controlling the circumstances under which the brain receives these stimuli and making sure that they agree with this internal state thus lessens anxiety. This is also true when people simply believe that they can control a situation. Neighbors who are invited to complain if a party grows too loud, for instance, tend to mind the noise less whether or not they actually do say something. It would appear that the warning itself and the possibility of acting upon a situation enable the brain to process stimuli. Assuming that one’s actions will make a difference may of course be a form of self-deception and yet, this “illusion of control” seems to endow people with self-esteem, enable them to recalibrate their values and priorities, and help them commit to tasks during challenging times.²⁵

Individuals who engage in magical thinking thus appear to derive greater confidence in themselves and their ability to make a difference. This is linked to the way they contemplate the future. By Gilbert’s estimate, human beings devote 12 percent of their daily thoughts to what looms ahead. The figure is startlingly precise, but he makes the case that projecting oneself into the future enables one to plan, avoid certain events, minimize the impact of others, and change one’s behavior if needed. A predictable environment is a controllable one. Because the future we conjure reflects our current hopes or worries, it is unlikely to come true as we imagine. Still, delving into the future, even a dark one, can provide a tighter grip on the present, which can seem comparatively more inviting or else find its place within an intelligible pattern. (Apophenia is the name given to our tendency to see patterns even where there are none.) One reason behind Nostradamus’s appeal may thus be that the predictions feed misguided expectations about the future (we can anticipate or even shape it) while fulfilling real but misunderstood needs about the present.²⁶

Even in times of crisis, moreover, the pain does not have to be unremitting. Patients and accident victims frequently shore up their self-esteem by telling themselves that others have it worse. Feelings of self-worth rest in large part on how one is doing relative to others. This is why personal setbacks often sting deeper than a calamity that affects multitudes of people. The misery of the world can help individuals withstand their own hardships, which seem less terrible in comparison. Readers found it easy to dip into the quatrains and find horrendous tidings about other people, countries, or even eras. In the city of Le Mans on the eve of World War II, to take a more recent example, a boy named Ghislain de Diesbach de Belleroche overheard his father, a bank director, discuss Nostradamus with friends. “Listening to the apocalyptic enumeration of our future misfortunes,” he recalled, “I found all the more delightful the comfort of that smoking room where our future and the future of Europe were gloomily discussed.… Beyond the green pines darkening in the gray of dusk, war lurked like a ravenous beast in other forests or faraway plains in countries with foreign names.” Immediate and yet distant, Nostradamus’s vast predictions helped people reframe disquieting circumstances.²⁷

The quatrains told people that, rather than simply facing emergencies, they were living through a collective catastrophe. They shared a fate and were now coming together and working toward harmony or redemption. Local or universal communities that coalesce around conceptions of good and evil can face momentous times and enter history as one. Nostradamus’s Prophecies contained localities, regions, and nations—and humanity as well. Although enduring social movements and rituals did not emerge around Nostradamus, these communities sometimes proved tangible. Pepys and Diesbach de Belleroche were in the company of others when Nostradamus came to their attention. Readers could likewise consult predictions on their own while picturing others doing the same. Whether physical or imagined, these communities could attenuate feelings of isolation. Whereas anxiety tends to draw people apart, fear pulls them together. Nostradamus’s evocative words could thus enable people to live with fear—not as mortified stupor but as a controlled, collective feeling that displaces the lonesome terror of the unknown.²⁸

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Appealing as the quatrains were, certain individuals found it increasingly difficult to espouse Nostradamus publicly by the seventeenth century. Those who rejected the supernatural deemed the phenomenon preposterous. Those whose status rested on good taste and restraint found it unseemly. There was a social price to pay. When a French baron wrote a theologian about Nostredame’s insight into some forthcoming marriage in 1659, the prelate exhorted him to trust divine Providence instead. A century later, the friends of an English lord urged him to stop penning reflections on these meaningless quatrains. He was starting to resemble the old fantasist, they warned.²⁹

Nostradamus nonetheless endured. This was partly because decoding and awed beholding proved strong enough to withstand such challenges. It was also because a third relationship—private recreation—flourished in aristocratic and bourgeois circles. Sometimes it was about personal enjoyment. Almanacs, for one, were fun to read. In 1551, the pope’s vice-legate in Avignon had sent his superior a copy of Nostredame’s latest prognostication “to pass the time more than to give it credence.” A century later, the future dean of Paris’s medical school received Nostradamian verses that, his friends insisted, related to a recent legal case. The doctor deciphered them with amusement. At other times, Nostradamus provided fodder for witty repartee, riddles, and entertaining enigmas. This verbal play thrived in salons, where nothing proved more reprehensible than boredom. With its anagrams and poetic rhythm, its bizarre legends and the wordplay around his name, Nostradamus was tailor-made for this world (prophecy and astrology grew commonplace in early modern parlor games). An eighteenth-century commentator noted that “jokers who have fun with anything” were applying quatrains to current events in order to amuse their friends. The commander of the garrison of Paris was one of them. In the 1760s, he would pull the Prophecies from his pocket during social occasions and read out a quatrain that seemed to revolve around a cardinal and the papacy. He laughed every time.³⁰

Another favorite activity was to compose quatrains in Nostradamus’s style, generally about current affairs. The more they resembled the original, the better. It was all about the artifice, all about flaunting one’s talent for poetry and pastiche. In 1694, a renowned Jesuit professor chided the eminent people who wrote quatrains about the Glorious Revolution and then attributed them to Nostradamus. Such rebukes had little impact. In France’s Dauphiné region, the lawyer Thomas Delorme entertained himself in the 1710s by composing predictions à la Nostradamus about Louis XIV’s campaigns. Farther east, King Frederick the Great of Prussia loved to read such imitations. In 1736, he received a prophecy about the year to come from a member of his court, the count von Manteuffel. Frederick was enchanted. “Nostradamus as you render him has so much wit,” he wrote the count. “Only superior geniuses can make the dead speak as they would have during their lifetime.” Manteuffel’s quatrain was more elegant, intelligible, and “polite” than anything Nostredame could ever have written. The count had bested the coarse prophet at his own game.³¹

Such games subsided when aristocratic entertainment declined along with courtly life, but Nostradamus endured as a learned pursuit or hobby. Clerics, doctors, landowners, and others loved to nose around libraries, dig for archaeological remnants, and collect butterflies. They enjoyed these pursuits for their own sake, took pride in advancing scholarship, and relished the prestige of the local savant. Some of them also grew interested in Nostradamus. In 1722, a Burgundian abbot asked a colleague to send him all references to the astrologer in the Mercure françois, a leading journal. Around the same time, a historian of La Rochelle collated the quatrains that mentioned his city. Meanwhile a Belgian canon hired a lackey to travel across France and purchase copies of theProphecies. Using a sixteenth-century edition as his standard, he then corrected the errors that had slipped in. This was “my pastime,” he explained.³²

This cleric cared more about the book’s contents than its appearance, but some bibliophiles went after the rare object (the low-end almanacs had less appeal). Aristocrats, wealthy commoners, and clerics owned copies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. One of Louis XIV’s sons, the duke du Maine, asked a bookseller to locate a good ancient edition in 1694—not an easy thing, apparently. A century later, a French merchant named Pierre-Antoine Bolongaro-Crevenna purchased four editions of the Propheciesand four book-length interpretations. As bibliophilia grew less exclusive in the nineteenth century, Nostradamus surfaced in more collections. Alongside the duke of Roxburghe and the banker James de Rothschild, owners included an English solicitor, a Greek silk merchant, the retired mayor of Marseille, the novelist Walter Scott, and a New York librarian named Wilberforce Eames. French bibliophiles bought works in their language; the English were partial to Garencières’s translation; and the Americans who later joined them gravitated toward old French editions.³³

Other hobbyists chose to clarify the meaning of quatrains or the principles of Nostradamus’s universe. These readers were decoding, to be sure, but they did not feel compelled to believe in Nostradamus’s powers, predict the future, or consider political matters. The implications and the attending anxieties were both lower. In the mid-eighteenth century, a French gentleman pondered a question posed by a friend: What do you think of Nostradamus? After analyzing dozens of quatrains, he concluded that the Centurieswere neither prophecies nor predictions but a veiled depiction of events that had occurred in Nostredame’s lifetime. “They are not announcing the future, but describing the past,” he concluded. The gentleman would not have been prouder had he proved an intractable mathematical theorem.³⁴

Nostradamus continued to generate obsessions in the nineteenth century. None was more enthused than Jean-Baptiste Boniard, a notary and onetime mayor of the village of Brèves, in Burgundy. Profession and politics mattered less to this man than his all-consuming hobbies. He kept a journal, observed planets, participated in archaeological excavations, and wrote articles for local journals. Nostradamus entered his life in 1837. The circumstances are unclear, but the sixty-year-old retiree was soon filling his copy of the Prophecies with feverish annotations. He refused to let go of a word until he had figured it out.³⁵

Quatrain 9.18 in particular perplexed Boniard. It spoke of “more jail time for the great Montmorency” and included a mystifying reference to “a Clere.” Boniard suspected that this expression designated the executioner who had beheaded the rebel duke de Montmorency in Toulouse in 1632 (interpreters had long linked the quatrain to this event). But he was not sure. There was only one place to find out: Toulouse itself. Off Boniard went, with a servant and the local priest in tow. The three men made their away across southern France. They stopped in a dozen cities, running out of money at one point, but they did reach Toulouse after three months on the road. Boniard discussed the quatrain with the mayor, local historians, and the city’s executioner. He pored over registers in the municipal archives and inspected the knife that had severed Montmorency’s head. It bore an inscription that was tantalizing but made little sense: “Celare-Toloze. 1621.” Unable to figure it out, Boniard and his companions headed home. One morning on that return leg, Boniard had an epiphany: Celare was the anagram of a Clere. He had proved his hypothesis! For the self-taught, rational notary, Nostradamus provided neither glimpses of the future nor models to live by. It was all about the chase and what his great-grandson (the novelist Romain Rolland) later called exciting charades. Boniard’s quest prefigured the Bible codes of modern times but without the apocalyptic overtones.

After solving the riddle to his satisfaction, Boniard moved on to natural history and biblical criticism. He could leave Nostradamus behind since he was neither spiritually nor emotionally attached to the phenomenon. Other amateurs were even more removed. The Dauphiné lawyer Delorme had enjoyed penning quatrains but disparaged the astrologer’s “utter foolishness.” In 1843, a newspaper editor from northern France purchased the Concordance of Nostradamus’s Prophecies with History (1712) but pointed out in an inside page that the book was inane. The renowned architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc acquired two editions of the Prophecies for his library that same year, and he, too, questioned the value of these mediocre verses. Why bother, then? Viollet-le-Duc deemed the quatrains curious, especially when they seemed to refer to Napoléon. Other nineteenth-century bibliophiles included the Prophecies in their collections of “rare and curious books.” One English catalog described Garencières’s edition as “an amusing book, full of odd stories.” As wonders came to stand for tasteless, plebeian superstition during the late seventeenth century, marvels endured in elite circles as curiosities. One pondered, investigated, or collected peculiar phenomena. The strange words, the underlying design, the rare editions, the meanings attributed to the quatrains, their enduring success across centuries—all this made Nostradamus curious, intriguing, and noteworthy.³⁶

These features also infused Nostradamus with something that, given its somber connotations these days, I had not expected to find: pleasure. In the sixteenth century, words entertained and virtuosity provided a spectacle worth savoring. Reading could furnish moral and political instruction as well as delightful dreamscapes and dialogues with ancients. The tale, the lesson, the well-crafted work were engaging. One is inclined to believe that some early modern readers enjoyed Nostradamus as well. Why not? It was easy to appreciate vast historical canvases, artful imitations, and ingenious interpretations that required self-direction and yielded mastery. This does not mean that fun was had by all. Many readers expected clarity and precision rather than arcane pronouncements. But Chavigny had set the tone by inviting his own readers to enjoy the quatrains in his company. In 1755, a learned French historian and prelate thanked a friend for lending him a commentary of Nostradamus. He had read it with great pleasure, he said. And while our Lyon humanist left no record of his sentiments, his manuscript betrays no irritation before Nostredame’s cryptic quatrains. On the contrary, he tackled them one after the other, moving along methodically and gaining momentum as he went along. One could swear that, like countless others, he found this activity enjoyable and perhaps even fulfilling.³⁷

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Nostradamus once again sated distinct appetites simultaneously. The arcane yet accessible predictions fulfilled yearnings for self-direction as well as external guidance. In the aftermath of crises, they provided material for narratives that invested events with meaning—narratives that one could either compose on one’s own or accept from others. Nostradamus met the expectations of people who needed to grapple with words and the world and sought deeper knowledge and direct participation in their own fate. It also spoke powerfully to those who needed external protection and reprieve from knowledge. And it drew still others into a realm that seeemed curious, or else curious and unsettling. In terms of readership or, more broadly, cultural reception, the phenomenon remained open, in flux, and in touch with multiple expectations.

I have discussed decoders, awed beholders, and people of leisure in turn, as if they made up separate families, but that is not necessarily the case. The terms also point toward outlooks that people embraced and then shed, or embraced partially, or combined with other outlooks. The decoder was not necessarily a decoder alone, and she certainly did not have to remain one forever. What was intriguing one day could become irksome or merely amusing the next. Many people welcomed Nostradamus during discrete moments in their lives, as their locus of control shifted a few degrees in one direction or another, as their anxieties intensified or waned, as the people around them set different examples. Learned people read Nostradamus “from time to time,” one almanac writer noted in 1689. Perhaps they did so the same way on every occasion. Perhaps not. Human beings are multifaceted and rarely free of contradictions.³⁸

A final Nostradamian reader, a Londoner whose name and occupation are unknown, illustrates the matter. In 1691, he pored over twelve quatrains and uncovered nuggets about the Fire of London, French defeats, and other timely questions. The decoder in him probed the verses with care, drawing from his knowledge of French, history, and politics to establish his own meaning. The beholder in him allowed that “the hand of some unseen Spirit” could be involved. And the person of leisure collected his thoughts in a long letter to a friend who would certainly find these prophecies and his ruminations equally puzzling and fascinating. Despite his efforts, this Londoner never did pin Nostradamus down. “What to ascribe the Predicting Power to, I leave to yourself,” he told his friend. Had someone asked him to explain his interest in the quatrains or define the stakes of the game, he would probably have struggled to answer. But when Nostradamus entered his field of vision, the one thing he could not do was look away.³⁹