Notes

The following abbreviations are used in the notes:

AMS	Archives municipales de Salon-de-Provence.
AN	Archives Nationales (Paris).
BML	Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon.
Leoni	Edgar Leoni, Nostradamus and His Prophecies (Mineola: Dover, NY, 2000 [1961]).
Lettres	Michel Nostradamus, Lettres inédites, ed. Jean Dupèbe (Geneva: Droz, 1983). Translated from the original Latin by Peter Lemesurier and the Nostradamus Research Group, http://bit.ly/mNdCOK.
Présages	Présages de Nostradamus, ed. Bernard Chevignard (Paris: Seuil, 1999).
Prophecies	Nostradamus, Prophecies, ed. Stéphane Gerson and Richard Sieburth, trans. Richard Sieburth (New York: Penguin, 2012).

PREFACE

  1   “Fire at the earth’s core”: quatrain 1.87, quoted in Ottawa Citizen, September 14, 2001. “This guy”: Henry, “What Madness Prompts, Reason Writes,” 286. The other quatrains in the e-mails were 6.97 and 10.72. See Daily Telegraph, October 3, 2001; Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy, 160; and 2001 Year-End Google Zeitgeist,http://bit.ly/4VQ2wo.

  2   “It’s one of those”: “Nostradamus Sales Shoot Straight Up,” BBC News, September 14, 2001, http://bbc.in/lIzY0F. “We were even”: Straits Times, September 16, 2001. See National Research Council (U.S.), The Internet Under Crisis Conditions, 43–44; New York Times, September 18, 2001; The Times (London), October 12, 2001; Joe McNally, “Spinning Nostradamus,” Fortean Times 152 (2001): 17; and the Mail Archive, September 12–13, 2001, http://bit.ly/mL5s3N.

  3   A picture of Norm Magnusson’s scupture and this author note can be found on his Web site: www.funism.com/art/afterthe11th.html.

  4   David Chase, “For All Debts Private and Public,” The Sopranos, HBO, September 15, 2002.

INTRODUCTION

  1   On the publications about Nostradamus: Los Angeles Times, August 2, 1966.

  2   “The kooks”: Brown, “Nostradamus Called It!” See Rachleff, The Occult Conceit, 139; Time, June 19, 1972; Jim Tester, A History of Western Astrology (New York: Ballantine, 1989), 215; and Minois, Histoire de l’avenir, des prophètes à la prospective, 321. There are few attentive studies of the phenomenon over time. See Sobel, “The Resurrection of Nostradamus”; Laroche, Prophéties pour temps de crise; Drévillon and Lagrange, Nostradamus, l’éternel retour; and Bellenger, “Nostradamus au fil du temps.”

  3   “Refuse of history”: Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 575, quoted in Irving Wohlfarth, “Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier,” in Beatrice Hanssen, ed., Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (New York: Continuum, 2006), 13. On the neglect of Nostradamus: Grafton’s probing “Starry Messengers,” 71–72; and Céard, “J. A. de Chavigny,” 427–29. On disenchantment, Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–56; as well as the recent statements in Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘the Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed”; and Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment.”

  4   “Masterpiece”: Thurston, The War & the Prophets, 164–65.

  5   Charpak and Broch, Debunked! 3–4.

  6   Tony Judt, “Edge People,” The Memory Chalet (New York: Penguin, 2010), 201–08.

  7   Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe.

  8   On collective memory, see Halbwachs, On Collective Memory; and Pierre Nora, ed., Rethinking France: Les Lieux de mémoire, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999–2010).

  9   See, for instance, Gary J. McDonald, “Prophets of Doom,” Huffington Post, February 21, 2011, http://huff.to/m4V594. On Nostradamus and 2012, see the afterword to Smoley, The Essential Nostradamus.

CHAPTER 1: A GOOD FRIEND IN RENAISSANCE EUROPE

  1   Nostradamus, Excellent & moult utile Opuscule, à tous nécessaire qui désirent avoir connoissance (Lyon, 1556), www.propheties.it/nostradamus/1555opuscole/opuscole.html; Nostredame to Lorenz Tubbe, July 15, 1561, Lettres, 85–89; Nostradamus, Almanach pour l’an M.D.LXVI … composé par Maistre Michel de Nostradame Docteur en médicine, Conseiller et Médecin ordinaire du Roy, de Salon de Craux en Provence (Lyon, [1565]); and Pronostico dell’anno M.D.LXIII. Composto & calculato par M. Michele Nostradamo, dottore in medicina di Salon di Craux in Provenza (Rimini, [1562]). On Salon: Sabine Baring-Gould, In Troubadour-land (London W. H. Allen, 1891), 60; Robert Brun, La ville de Salon au Moyen-Age (Aix-en-Provence: Imprimerie universitaire de Provence, 1924); and Gimon, Chroniques de la ville de Salon, 277–78.

  2   Lemesurier, Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 38; Knecht, The French Renaissance Court, 44, 259; Boutier, Dewerpe, and Nordman, Un tour de France royal; and Wilson, Nostradamus, 190.

  3   “I pray to God”: Catherine de Médicis, Lettres de Catherine de Médicis, publiées par M. le comte Hector de La Ferrière (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1905), 10: 145; Gaufridi, Histoire de Provence, 2:526; César de Nostradamus, L’histoire et la chronique de Provence de Caesar de Nostradamus, 802; and Gimon, Chroniques de la ville de Salon,198–99, 243–44.

  4   “But one Nostradamus”: Tubbe to Nostredame, December 1, 1560, Lettres, 63–66. See also Hans Rosenberger to Nostredame, March 11, 1561, Lettres, 67–72.

  5   Leroy, Nostradamus, 27–28; and Rouvier, Nostradamus et les de Nostredame, 17. On Nostradamus as a humanist: Jean Dupèbe, “Nostradamus humaniste,” in Chomarat et al., Nostradamus ou le savoir transmis, 28–43.

  6   Regarding Nostradamus and his family: Lhez, “L’ascendance paternelle de Michel de Nostredame”; Louis Gimon, “Généalogie des Nostradamus,” La Provence poétique, historique et littéraire 11 (1883): 1; and Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 21. On Provençal Jews: Danièle and Carol Iancu, Les Juifs du Midi: une histoire millénaire(Avignon: A. Barthélemy, 1995); and Venard, “L’Eglise d’Avignon au XVI^e siècle,” 206–10.

  7   Leroy, Nostradamus, 33–50; Drévillon and Lagrange, Nostradamus, 12; and Rouvier, Nostradamus and les de Nostredame, 22–25.

  8   Bonnet, La faculté de médecine de Montpellier, 68–75; and Gouron, “Documents inédits sur l’Université de médecine de Montpellier,” 374–75.

  9   “Terrible evil”: Nostradamus, Excellent & moult utile Opuscule, 99. On Renaissance physicians, see Brockliss and Jones, The Medical World in Early Modern France, 202; and Daston and Park’s important Wonders and the Order of Nature, 172.

10   Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 209–13; Jouanna, La France du XVI^e siècle, 9; and Knecht, French Renaissance Court, 43.

11   Crosby, The Measure of Reality, 90.

12   Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 38–49, 67–69; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 8–9; Delaunay, La vie médicale aux XVI^e, XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles, 264–66; and Lucenet, Les grandes pestes en France, 18, 30, 115–16, 156–63.

13   “Sins and wickedness”: Nostradamus, Excellent Tretise, Shewing Suche Perillous, and Contagious Infirmities (London, [1559]), n.p. [5]. See Nostradamus, Excellent & moult utile Opuscule, 49–53; and Forme et manière de vivre, très utile, pour éviter Au danger de Peste 6–7. On understandings of the plague: Delumeau, La peur en Occident, 155–56.

14   On Nostradamus and public hygiene: Lemesurier, Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 53; and Allemand, “La présence lyonnaise de Nostradamus.” On doctors and the plague: Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Florence, 34–35.

15   Leroy, Nostradamus, 28–29; and Greenblatt, Will in the World, 288–90. On bereaved parents at this time: Ginette Raimbault, Lorsque l’enfant disparaît (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996), 13–25.

16   “When you receive”: Nostredame to Tubbe, July 15, 1561, Lettres, 85–89. See the biographical sketch of Nostredame in Chavigny, La Première face.

17   Nostradamus, medical consultation of the cardinal Laurent Strozzi, in Visier, Nostradamus au XVI^e siècle. See Wilson, Nostradamus, 55; Christian Kert, Salon-de-Provence en 1900 (Aix-en-Provence: Edisud, 1980), 23; and Delaunay, Vie médicale, 171–87.

18   Nostradamus, Excellent Tretise, [6–8]; and Nostradamus, Excellent & moult utile Opuscule, 3–4, 20–22.

19   There are many books on astrology. See, for instance, Thomas’s classic Religion and the Decline of Magic; and Grafton’s superb Cardano’s Cosmos.

20   Roland H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus, 1511–1553 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), 113; and Pomian, “Astrology as a Naturalistic Theology of History,” 32–33.

21   Réimpression de l’almanach de Michel de Nostredame pour l’année 1563 (Mariebourg: Sub St Michaelis, 1905), 14. See Rouvier, Nostradamus et les de Nostredame, 35; and Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 108–18.

22   “Our ill-fated”: Rosenberger to Nostredame, December 15, 1561, Lettres, 109–15. See also Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 210–45.

23   Lemesurier, Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 55; and Cunningham and Grell, Four Horsemen, 305.

24   “Many nights”: Nostredame to Rosenberger, September 8, 1561, Lettres, 94–98. The key sources for our understanding of Nostradamus’s practice are his correspondence and Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, esp. 123–25, 318–19.

25   “I await”: Rosenberger to Nostredame, April 8, 1561, Lettres, 73–75. See Sigismund Woyssell to Nostredame, May 19, 1555, Lettres, 38.

26   “Your value”: Nostredame to Lobbetius, July 7, 1565, Lettres, 154–55.

27   “The stars”: Nostredame to Bérard, August 27, 1562, Lettres, 140–43. “Profit”: Benoît de Flandria to Nostredame, May 1, 1564, Lettres, 151.

28   “Effort”: Nostredame to Rosenberger, October 15, 1561, Lettres, 102–105. “Take care”: Nostredame to Rosenberger, September 9, 1561, Lettres, 94–98. “I will continue”: Rosenberger to Nostredame, June 17, 1561, Lettres, 82–84.

29   “I am one”: Tubbe to Nostredame, August 9, 1561, Lettres, 91–93. See Pierre de Forlivio to Nostredame, November 1557, Lettres, 33.

30   There is growing interest in the history of friendship. See Marlow, “Friendship in Renaissance England”; Langer, Perfect Friendship, 22, 97; and Rey, “Communauté et individu,” 618–19.

31   “I sympathized”: Nostredame to Tubbe, July 15, 1561, Lettres, 85–89. “Deepest thoughts”: Nostredame to Tubbe, May 13, 1562, Lettres, 131–37. “Venerated friend”: François Bérard to Nostredame, [1562?], Lettres, 35. See Nostredame to Bérard, August 27, 1562, Lettres, 140–43; and Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 105.

32   Knecht, French Renaissance Court, 71, 247. On Catherine’s strategies: Crawford, Perilous Performances, chap. 2.

33   Knecht, French Renaissance Court, 220–23; and Solnon, Catherine de Médicis, 160–61, 335–37.

34   “Spectacle historique. Le siècle de Nostradamus,” [1987], AMS box “Brochures touristiques.”

35   On this episode, see Monluc, Commentaires et lettres, 2:287, quoted in Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 33, 39–41; Defrance, Catherine de Médicis, 57–73; Knecht, French Renaissance Court, 17–21, 90, 241–42; and Solnon, Catherine de Médicis, 81–82. See also Sutherland, “Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre and the French Crisis of Authority, 1559–1562,” in his Princes, Politics and Religion, 55.

36   Contemporaries may also have consulted Nostredame’s 1557 almanac, which contained a line about a great loss for France two years hence. See Patrice Guinard, “Le décès du roi Henri II deux fois présagé par Nostradamus,” Corpus Nostradamus 51, http://bit.ly/zhGz0v.

37   Larkey, “Astrology and Politics in the First Years of Elizabeth’s Reign,” 181; Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press, 60, 70; Monluc, Commentaires et Lettres, 2:287; and Rosenberger to Nostredame, December 15, 1561, Lettres, 109–15.

38   “Peace, love”: Nostredame to Catherine de Médicis, December 22, 1565, trans. Lemesurier, http://bit.ly/kygW7K. “Success”: Gabrielle Simeoni to Nostredame, February 1, 1556, Lettres, 29. See Don Frances de Alava to Philip II, April 4, 1565, in Alexandre Teulet, ed., Relations politiques de la France et de l’Espagne avec l’Ecosse au XVIe siècle, 5 vols. (Paris, 1862), 5:9; Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 51–53, 435–37; and Jean-Patrice Boudet, “Les astrologues et le pouvoir sous le règne de Louis XI,” in Ribémont, ed., Observer, lire, écrire, 43. On Renaissance professionals: Biow, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries, 13.

CHAPTER 2: THE POWER OF WORDS

  1   “I believe”: Rosenbeger to Nostredame, December 15, 1561, Lettres, 109–15. “Admirable virtues”: Rosenberger to Nostredame, March 11, 1561, Lettres, 69–72. “Coin of the realm”: quatrain 6.23.

  2   “General disposition”: Nostradamus, La Grand’ Pronostication nouvelle avec portenteuse prediction, pour l’an MDLVII (Paris, 1557). See Robert Benazra, “Les Pronostications et Almanachs de Michel Nostradamus,” 2002, http://bit.ly/mmBTfd.

  3   On the Mirabilis Liber: Britnell and Stubbs, “The Mirabilis Liber.”

  4   I refer to publishers, although members of the book trade labeled themselves printers (imprimeurs) or booksellers (libraires) at this time. Many combined the two activities.

  5   André Pelletier et al., Histoire de Lyon des origines à nos jours (Lyon: Editions lyonnaises d’art et d’histoire, 2007); and Allemand, “La présence lyonnaise de Nostradamus.”

  6   On Lyon and print: Febvre and Martin, L’apparition du livre; Davis, “Publisher Guillaume Rouillé, Businessman and Humanist”; and Alison Saunders, “Paris to Lyon and Back Again: Trends in Emblem Publishing in the Mid-Sixteenth Century in France,” in Ford and Jondorf, eds., Intellectual Life in Renaissance Lyon, 67–74.

  7   “Such is the fashion”: Jean Brotot to Nostredame, September 20, 1557, Lettres, 31–32.

  8   Mirella Conenna and Anna Firenze, “Les signes de Nostradamus: Sur les traductions italiennes des Centuries,” in Bracops, ed., Nostradamus traducteur traduit, 111–31; and Larkey, “Astrology and Politics,” 179.

  9   “Changed the appearance”: Olivier de Serres, Le théâtre d’agriculture, 2 vols. (Grenoble: Dardelet, 1973 [1600]), 2:254. See Bertin and Audin, Adam de Craponne et son canal, esp. 117–18.

10   “I would like you”: Nostredame to Rosenberger, September 9, 1561, Lettres, 94–98. On this media culture, see Thompson’s stimulating The Media and Modernity.

11   Delaurenti, La puissance des mots.

12   On poetic furor: Thomas Sébillet, Art poétique français, 1548, in Francis Goyet, ed., Traités de poétique et de rhétorique de la Renaissance 52; and Claude-Gilbert Dubois, La poésie du XVI^e siècle (Paris: Bordas, 1989), 55–57. Floyd Gray discusses the power of words in his La Renaissance des mots, 46.

13   On Nostradamus, kabbalah, and Judaism: Secret, Les kabbalistes chrétiens de la Renaissance, 319; and Pierre Béhar, “Nostradamus et la tradition de l’occultisme renaissant,” talk given in Salon, August 23, 2003. On Judaism and books: Jean Baumgarten, Le peuple des livres: Les ouvrages populaires dans la société ashkénaze, XVI^e–XVIII^esiècle(Paris: Albin Michel 2010), 13. On Nostredame as a poet: Crouzet, Nostradamus; Carlstedt, “La poésie oraculaire de Nostradamus”; and Bellenger, “Nostradamus prophète ou poète?” On Nostredame’s poetics: Richard Sieburth, “The Poetics of Futurity,” Prophecies, xxiii–xlii.

14   Royon, Lyon l’humaniste; McFarlane, Renaissance France, 148; and Richard Sieburth, introduction to Maurice Scève, Emblems of Desire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003).

15   “Honor”: Nostradamus, Pronostication nouvelle, pour l’an mil cinq cens cinquante & huict (Paris, 1557) [1]; and Gabrielle Simeoni to Nostredame, February 1, 1556, Lettres, 29. On Vauzelles, see Nostradamus, dedication to Vauzelles, Pronostication nouvelle pour l’an mil cinq cens soixante deux. Composée par Maistre Michel Nostradamus Docteur en Médecine, de Salon de Craux en Provence (Paris, [1561]); and Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 29–30.

16   The original portent can be found in Présages, 132. I am adapting the translation from Leoni, 467. See Chevignard, annotations in Présages, 121, 174. On the quatrain in the sixteenth century: Baradié, “Pibrac et le genre du quatrain moralisateur au XVIe siècle.”

17   “All dying”: quatrain 3.84. See Présages, 132.

18   “I have written out”: Nostredame to Johannes Lobbetius, July 7, 1565, Lettres, 154–55. See Lemesurier, Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 100.

19   “Adventures”: Réimpression de l’almanac de Michel de Nostredame pour l’année 1563, 25. “Unusual”: Présages, 279. See La Grand’ Pronostication nouvelle avec portenteuse prediction, pour l’an MDLVII, [6, 11].

20   “Snow” and “many and various”: La Grand’ Pronostication nouvelle avec portenteuse prediction, pour l’an MDLVII, [17, 13]. “Beaten”: Nostradamus, Pronostication nouvelle, pour l’an mil cinq cens cinquante & huict, [7]. “For forty”: quatrain 1.17. On Nostredame’s poetic style, see also Carlstedt, “Poésie oraculaire,” 142–45, 162; and Dubois, L’imaginaire de la Renaissance, 39–40, 60.

21   “Us”: Nostradamus, Pronostication nouvelle, pour l’an mil cinq cens cinquante & huict, [22]. See Cornelys Scute, A Pronostication for the Yere of Our Lord God M.CCCCC.XLIIII (London: R. Grafton, 1544); and Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 33–34. Debbagi Baranova discusses the politics of poetry in war-torn France in “Poésie officielle, poésie partisane pendant les guerres de religion.”

22   “I gargle”: interview of Blaise Cendrars by Michel Manoll.

23   On Nostradamus as cribber: Gilles Polizzi, “‘Lac trasmenien portera tesmoignage ou de l’usage de l’histoire romaine dans les Centuries,” in Chomarat et al., Nostradamus ou le savoir transmis, 70–71.

CHAPTER 3: UNFATHOMABLE AFFLICTIONS

  1   “I enjoy”: interview of Cendrars by Michel Manoll. “Veiled terms”: Haton, Mémoires, 1:39–40.

  2   “If you could”: François Bérard to Nostredame, [1562], Lettres, 35 “What is it”: Tubbe to Nostredame, June 7, 1561, Lettres, 79–81. “Tears”: quatrain 6.81.

  3   Lemesurier, Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 89; Béhar, Langues occultes de la Renaissance, 291; and Chomarat, introduction to Michel de Nostradamus, Les Prophéties: Lyon, 1568 (Lyon: Editions M. Chomarat, 2000), 18–20.

  4   For these dates: quatrains 6.2, 6.54, 10.91, 1.49, 10.72, and Epistle to Henri II (June 27, 1558), in Prophecies, 203. See also Chomarat, “De quelques dates clairement exprimées par Michel Nostradamus dans ses ‘Prophéties,’” 83–93.

  5   “If I have made”: Nostradamus, preface, Prophecies, 4–5.

  6   “Natural instinct” and “nocturnal”: Nostradamus, preface to Henri II, Prophecies, 196–97. See Nostredame to François Bérard, August 27, 1562, Lettres, 140–43. The best studies of Nostradamus as a prophet are Pot, “Prophétie et mélancolie,” 217–21; and Béhar, Langues occultes, chap. 5.

  7   Quatrains 4.14, 3.94, and 2.70; Brind’Amour, annotation in Nostradamus, Premières centuries, 125; and Dubois, “L’invention prédictive,” 551–53.

  8   “Par la puissance des trois rois temporelz, / En autre lieu sera mis le saint siege: / Où la substance de l’esprit corporel, / Sera remys & receu pour vray siege.” There are references to the divine word in quatrains 2.27 and 3.2. See Prophecies, 322.

  9   “Brothers & sisters”: quatrain 2.20. “As a good”: Nostradamus, Last Will and Testament, June 17, 1566, in Leoni, 773. See quatrain 2.8. On Nostradamus as a Protestant: Lhez, “Aperçu d’un fragment de la correspondance de Michel de Nostredame,” 224; Dupèbe, introduction to Lettres, 20–21; and Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 22–25. On Nostradamus as a devout Catholic: Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 101–02.

10   “Execrable”: Nostradamus, preface, Prophecies, 5. “Atlas”: Nostredame to Pope Pius IV, April 20, 1561, http://bit.ly/twlgRc. See Nostredame to Jean de Morel, November 30, 1561, Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire de France 7 (1853): 117–20, http://cura.free.fr/dico3/701Acour.html; Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 103; quatrain 10.65; and Réimpression de l’almanach de Michel de Nostredame pour l’année 1563, 28.

11   Perrine Galand-Hallyn, “Les ‘fureurs plus basses’ de la Pléiade,” Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier 15 (1998): 170.

12   Présages, 200; and Nostradamus, La Grand’ Pronostication nouvelle avec portenteuse prediction, pour l’an MDLVII, [13].

13   “Dispatched”: quatrain 1.5. The original line in quatrain 2.9 is “Pour luy grand peuple sans foy & loy mourra.” I am quoting the translation in Prophecies, 41. See LeVert, The Prophecies and Enigmas of Nostradamus, 35–38.

14   Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 54; Lemesurier, The Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 122; and Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 14–15.

15   These are quatrains 7.41 and 7.42. See Brind’Amour, introduction to Nostradamus, Premières Centuries, xxxi; von Klinckowstroem, “Die ältesten Ausgaben,” 364; and Chomarat, introduction to Nostradamus, Les Prophéties: Lyon, 1568, 15.

16   Compare Présages, 114, and An Almanac for the Yere MDLXII Made by Maister Michael Nostrodamus (1562). See Chomarat, Bibliographie Nostradamus, 38.

17   On meter: Carlstedt, “La poésie oraculaire.” On Nostredame’s Provençal roots: Clébert, Nostradamus mode d’emploi. On Nostradamus as historian: Polizzi, “‘Lac trasmenien portera tesmoignage’ ou de l’usage de l’histoire romaine dans les Centuries,” in Chomarat et al., Nostradamus ou le savoir transmis, 46–50; and Prévost, Nostradamus, le mythe et la réalité, 41.

18   Nostradamus’s translation, an eighty-six-page manuscript, was itself lost and rediscovered in France’s National Library in 1967. See Nostradamus, Interprétation des hiéroglyphes de Horapollo; and Nostradamus, dedication to Vauzelles, Pronostication nouvelle pour l’an mil cinq cens soixante deux. Composée par Maistre Michel Nostradamus. On hieroglyphs and symbolic expression during the Renaissance: Boas, ed., The Hieroglyphics of Horapollo; and Martin et al., L’énigmatique à la Renaissance.

19   “Cryptic sentences”: Nostradamus, Prophecies, 123. “Will be discovered”: Présages, 229. See Camden, “Elizabethan Almanacs and Prognostications,” 88–90.

20   Nostradamus, La Grand’ Pronostication nouvelle avec portenteuse prediction, pour l’an MDLVII, [13]. These poets included Jacques Peletier du Mans and Pontus de Tyard. See Peletier du Mans, Art poétique, 1555, in Goyet, Traités de poétique, esp. 272–82; and François Lecercle, “Enigme et poésie à Lyon au milieu du seizième siècle,” in Ford and Jondorf, Intellectual Life in Renaissance Lyon, 166–68. On Renaissance poetry and obscurity: Dubois, “L’invention prédictive,” 551; and Pantin, La poésie du ciel en France, 107. On Nostradamus and Scève: Saulnier, Maurice Scève, 141–45.

21   Quatrain 6.38; Marconville, Recueil mémorable d’aucuns cas merveilleux advenuz de noz ans, fol. 8 verso and 9 recto, quoted in Benazra, Répertoire chronologique, 63; Anon., Remonstrances, to the Duke de Mayne, 10; and Greenblatt, Will in the World, 85.

22   “Hunger”: presage for July 1560, in Leoni, 473. “Everything”: Nostradamus, La Grand’ Pronostication nouvelle avec portenteuse prediction, pour l’an MDLVII, [3]. “Double doubt”: quatrain 3.55. “Renovation”: Nostradamus, Pronostication nouvelle, pour l’an mil cinq cens cinquante & huict, [12]. On Nostredame’s references to darkness and lightness: Carlstedt, “Nostradamus mélancolique,” 50.

23   “The good”: 1558 portent, Présages, 288. See also Présages, 146; La Grand’ Pronostication nouvelle avec portenteuse prediction, pour l’an MDLVII, [18]; and Carlstedt, “Poésie oraculaire,” 115.

24   This paragraph and the next draw from Cunningham and Grell, Four Horsemen, 2, 14, 96–115, 206, and chap. 5; Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity, 42–44, 93–94; Jouanna, La France du XVI^e siècle, 543–53, 620–21; and Lucenet, Grandes pestes en France, 109–10.

25   “Popular fury”: Nostredame to Tubbe, May 13, 1562, Lettres, 131–37. See Venard, “L’Eglise d’Avignon,” 517, 655–58, 1816–22; and Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 29–30.

26   Bernard McGinn presents these features in his Visions of the End, 10. See also his “The End Is Not Yet: Reflections on the State of Apocalyptic Studies,” in Vauchez, ed., L’attente des temps nouveaux, 136.

27   On perceptions of Turks and the Ottoman Empire: Tinguely, L’écriture du Levant à la Renaissance, 15–18; Lestringant, “Guillaume Postel et l’‘obession turque,’” in his Ecrire le monde à la Renaissance, 202–12; and Deny, “Les pseudo-prophéties concernant les Turcs au XVIe siècle,” 204–10. I quote the King James Bible.

28   Claude Baecher, “Phénomène prophétique et schémas eschatologiques,” 39–42; Weber, Apocalypses, 69; and Crouzet, Guerriers de Dieu, 1:109–30. Compare Venard, “L’Eglise d’Avignon,” 262–68.

29   “Horrendous”: Li Presagi et Pronostici di M. Michele Nostradamo Francese (1564). See An Almanacke for the Yeare of Oure Lorde God, 1559. Composed by Mayster Mychael Nostradamus; and Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 32, 37.

30   Présages, 295; and Réimpression de l’almanach de Michel de Nostredame pour l’année 1563, 28, 34. See Béhar, Langues occultes, 153, 301; and McGinn, Visions of the End, xvii. On the tragic and comic plots of apocalyptic literature: O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, esp. 72, 200–05.

31   “Help”: Nostradamus, Pronostication nouvelle, pour l’an mil cinq cens cinquante & huict, [11]. See Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 80–83; and Crouzet, Nostradamus: Une médecine des âmes à la Renaissance.

32   “Transmutations”: Présages, 232. “From good”: Présages, 160. Nostradamus melded fortune with divine Providence to ward off suggestions that happenstance or the devil, rather than God, governed human destiny. See Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 76. On time and the Renaissance: Roubichou-Stretz, La vision de l’histoire dans l’oeuvre de la Pléiade, 12–15; la Garanderie, “La méditation philosophique sur le temps au XVI^e siècle”; and Jones-Davies, “Les prognostications ou les destins artificiels au temps de la Renaissance anglaise,” in Jones-Davies, Devins et charlatans, 66–67.

33   “It is not easy”: Rosenberger to Nostredame, March 11, 1561, Lettres, 69–72. “Here is the month”: Nostradamus, presage for October 1563, translated in Leoni, 485. “Venom”: Nostradamus, presage for September 1557, in Présages, 125. On time, see Petey-Girard, introduction to Nostradamus, Prophéties, 28–29, 40. See also Dubois, “L’invention prédictive,” 552.

34   “World explanations”: Nostredame to Pope Pius IV, April 20, 1561, http://bit.ly/twlgRc. “France”: quatrain 3.23. “Galllic monarch”: Présages, 265. The statistics come from Leoni, 538–41.

35   Nostradamus, La Grand’ Pronostication nouvelle avec portenteuse prediction, pour l’an MDLVII, [11]; Présages, 197; and Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), chap. 11. On European consciousness, compare J. R. Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (New York: Atheneum, 1994), 36–38; and Jean Balsamo, “‘Voici venir d’Europe tout honneur’: identité aristocratique et conscience européenne au XVI^e siècle,” in David Cowling, ed., Conceptions of Europe in Renaissance France (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 24–29.

36   “Folk”: quatrain 3.43. “Topographies of sensation”: Conley, An Errant Eye, 201. On Nostredame and guidebooks: Liaroutzos, “Les prophéties de Nostradamus.”

37   “Literary nationalism”: Hodges, Urban Poetics in the French Renaissance, 61. Hodges’s view is close to the one articulated by Timothy Hampton in his Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century. Cf. Cohen, “Poets into Frenchmen,” 173–202. On maps: Pelletier, De Ptolémée à la Guillotière, 36. My discussion benefited from exchanges with Paul Cohen.

38   On Nostradamus’s literary structure: Shepheard, “Pour une poétique du genre oraculaire,” 60.

39   On these genres, see Lever, “Introduction. Naissance du fait divers,” in his Canards sanglants, 7–46; Séguin, L’information en France avant le périodique; and Biet, Théâtre de la cruauté et récits sanglants en France, esp. editor’s introduction.

40   “Extraordinary”: Réimpression de l’almanach de Michel de Nostredame pour l’année 1563, 21. See Arthur O. Lovejoy’s classic The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).

41   “Life is more”: Excellent Treatise, 1559, [4]. “The yearning”: Nostradamus, Présages, 309.

42   “From all sides” and “for the great ones”: presages for 1561, translated in Leoni, 475, 477.

43   Ernest B. Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 123.

44   “A sinister age”: quatrain 2.10.

45   Thompson, Media and Modernity, 32–35.

CHAPTER 4: FAME AND INFAMY

  1   This holy day marked Mary’s visit to her kin Elizabeth. “May God”: Nostradamus, Almanach pour l’an MDLXVI, 82. See Nostredame to Johannes Lobbetius, December 13, 1565, Lettres, 163–65; and Nostradamus, Last Will and Testament, June 17, 1566, in Leoni, 773–79.

  2   “With full pomp”: Buget, “Etude sur Nostradamus” (1863), 462. See Gimon, Chroniques de la ville de Salon, 250; and Lhez, “Aperçu d’un fragment,” 222.

  3   On death during the Renaissance: Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London; Chaunu, La mort à Paris; and Jean-Luc Laffont, ed., Visages de la mort dans l’histoire du Midi toulousain IVe–XIX^e siècles (Aspet: Pyrégraph, 1999).

  4   “The most famous”: Garencières, The True Prophecies or Prognostications, [vii]. “One name alone”: Sigismund Woyssell to Nostredame, May 19, 1559, Lettres, 38.

  5   “Aware”: Rosenberger to Nostredame, March 11, 1562, Lettres, 69–72.

  6   “Almost divine”: Benoît de Flandria to Nostredame, May 1, 1564, Lettres, 151. “Praised to the skies”: Iocabus Securivagus to Nostredame, May 1, 1561, Lettres, 76–77.

  7   Alexandre (?) de la Tourette to Nostredame, December 12, 1554, quoted in Lettres, 172; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 332–33, 342; and François de Boivin, Mémoires du Sieur François de Boivin, 44. On Gouberville: Gouberville, Un Sire de Gouberville, 209–10; as well as the annotated passages in Guinard, “Dictionnaire Nostradamus,” http://bit.ly/lgGzvQ.

  8   Léon Ménard, Histoire civile, ecclésiastique et littéraire de la ville de Nîmes, 7 vols. (Paris: Chaubert & Herissant, 1744–1758), 4:223; Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 34–41; and Estienne Pasquier to Airault, in Pasquier, Lettres historiques pour les années 1556–1594, 361. I am grateful to Alan Tulchin for the Nîmes reference.

  9   Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, introduction, and Paul Saenger, “Reading in the Later Middle Ages,” in Cavallo and Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West, 27–36, 173–82; and Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public.

10   Chartier, “Publishing Strategies,” 179; Gouberville, Un Sire de Gouberville, 210; and Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, 225. On popular and elite cultures: Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, xi–xiii, 193.

11   “Reigned here”: Fulke, Antiprognosticon, 12. See Rochemaillet, Portraicts de plusieurs hommes illustres.

12   “The beginning”: Girolamo Cardano, quoted in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 106. On reputation and fame: Leon Battista Alberti, “On the Family” (1432), in John W. Boyer et al., eds., Readings in Western Civilization, 9 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5:94–95, 103; Guenée, Du Guesclin et Froissart, 10, 29–42, 53; and Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown, 236, 282–84, 302–03.

13   “Sublime name”: La Daguenière, Monstre d’abus, [7]. See Guenée, Du Guesclin et Froissart, 134.

14   “May the universe”: Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 40. Stephen Greenblatt embraces this position in his classic Renaissance Self-Fashioning. See also Rigolot, Poésie et Renaissance, 72.

15   “Spirit of truth”: Réimpression de l’almanach de Michel de Nostredame pour l’année 1563, 20. “A commiseration”: Nostradamus, The Prognostication for the Yeare 1559, [46–47].

16   “Once captive”: quatrain 3.87. “Western planets”: Nostradamus, Almanach pour l’an 1557, [40].

17   “Infection”: Coxe, A Short Treatise, [4]. “Calumniators”: Nostradamus, epistle to Lord Birague, June 15, 1566, http://bit.ly/kPSN6Z. See Nostredame to Tubbe, July 15, 1561, Lettres, 85–89; and Bloch, Les rois thaumaturges, 421–26. My discussion of Nostradamus’s detractors builds upon Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile;Chevignard, introduction to Présages; and Millet, “Feux croisés.”

18   Julius Scaliger, “In Nostradamum,” Poemata Farrago, 1:22, discussed in Guinard, “Les trois épigrammes de Julius Caesar Scaliger contre Nostradamus,” http://bit.ly/k0yrHe.

19   “Sorcerers”: Première invective du Seigneur Hercules, [8]. “Foolish”: Calvin, Advertissement contre l’astrologie judiciaire, 51. See Millet, “Feux croisés,” 115–21; and John Lewis, “Les pronostications et la propagande évangélique,” Cahiers V.-L. Saulnier 4 (1987): 76–82.

20   “Diabolical”: Videl, Déclaration des abus, ignorances et séditions, [33]. “Judaic”: Scaliger, “In Nostradamum,” 1:222. The dinner and the attempted sack took place; Nostradamus’s prediction is hearsay. See Saconay, Généalogie et la fin des Huguenaux, 96 recto and verso; and Guinard, “Une prédiction de Nostradamus attestée par Gabriel de Saconay,” http://bit.ly/iABinM.

21   “Off the top”: Nikolaus Prueckner, tract on comets of 1532, quoted in Green, Printing and Prophecy, 135. “Sweet”: Coxe, A Short Treatise, [3–4]. See Videl, Déclaration des abus, [i, 2, 5, 19, 33]; Couillart, Les contredits du seigneur du Pavillon les Lorriz en Gastinois, 3a, 8a; and Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 37.

22   “Hideous”: Première invective du Seigneur Hercules, [10]; Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 66, 181, 192, 202, 209; and David Cressy, “Lamentable, Strange, and Wonderful: Headless Monsters in the English Revolution,” in Knoppers and Landes, eds., Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities, 47–48.

23   Burns, “The King’s Two Monstrous Bodies,” 189.

24   “Great liar”: “Le fol s’y fie de Monstradabus,” in Montaiglon, Recueil de poésies françoises des XV^e et XVI^e siècles, 4:294. “Nostra damus”: This distich has been attributed to the poets Estienne Jodelle and Charles Utenhove and to the theologian Théodore Beza. Its author matters less than its wide circulation. The earliest reference I uncovered is a 1559 letter by the poet Joachim du Bellay, in his Lettres, 28–29. See Marconville, Recueil mémorable d’aucuns cas merveilleux advenuz de noz ans, fol. 9, quoted in Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 73.

25   “These incompetent”: Tubbe to Nostredame, December 1, 1560, Lettres, 63–66. “Poor France”: Ronsard, “Elegie à G. des Autels,” 1560, in Elégie de P. de Ronsard Vandomois, 4 recto. “O crazed Ronsard”: Anon., Remonstrance à la Royne mère du Roy sur le discours de Pierre de Ronsard des misères de ce temps, 1563, in Pineaux, La polémique protestante contre Ronsard, 180–81. On Ronsard, wonders, and Nostradamus, see Céard, La nature et les prodiges, 213–14. See also la Croix du Maine, Premier volume de la bibliothèque, 330.

26   “Let those”: quatrain 6.100. On Renaissance personas: Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 9; Nostradamus, dedication to Fabrice de Serbelloni, Réimpression de l’almanach de Michel de Nostredame pour l’année 1563, 16; and Nostradamus, epistle to Lord Birague, June 15, 1566.

27   “The Book”: Gadbury, Cardines Coeli, 60. See “Petit abrégé de [la vie de] Nostradamus,” undated seventeenth-century manuscript, xxxv, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, ms. 820; Marie-Claude Groshens, ed., Héros populaires (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2001); and Raglan, The Hero, 174–75.

28   “Wish for your money”: Thomas Jefferson’s European Travel Diaries (Ithaca: I. Stephanus, 1987), 35. “Has made Salon”: Anon., Relation divertissante d’un voyage fait en Provence, 64. I have drawn from Louis Coulon, L’Ulysse françois, ou le Voyage de France, de Flandre et de Savoye (Paris: G. Clousier, 1643), 534–35; Locke’s Travels in France, 1675–1679, ed. John Lough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 72–73; Journal d’un voyage aux environs de la Loire et de la Saône jusqu’à la mer Méditerranée, ed. Henri Duranton and Christiane Lauvergnat-Gagnière (Saint-Etienne: Université de Saint-Etienne, 1993 [1772 and 1776]), 115; and Boyer, Histoire de l’invention du tourisme, 60–61.

29   “Michel”: Première invective du Seigneur Hercules, [12]. “Exactly in his own”: John Durant Breval, Remarks on Several Parts of Europe, Relating Chiefly to Their Antiquities and History, 2 vols. (London: Linton, 1738), 2:171.

30   “My death”: Chavigny, Première face, 4. “Will be found”: Presages, 189. See de La Porte, Les epithètes, 25, 220; and Charles de Basci and Léon Ménard, Pièces fugitives pour servir à l’histoire de France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1759), 1:82, in Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 524.

CHAPTER 5: THE NOSTRADAMIAN UNDERWORLD

  1   “Great Celtic Lion”: François de Malherbe to Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, December 11, 1609, in Œuvres de Malherbe, 3:121. “All that is new”: Pierre de L’Estoile, entry of March 1606, Registre-journal de Henri IV et de Louis XIII, 395. “There are many”: Naudé, History of Magick, 217. This account also rests on Belot, Centuries Prophétiques; Anon., Procès, examen, confessions et négations du méchant & exécrable parricide François Ravaillac, 2nd ed. (Paris: J. Richer, 1611), in Supplément aux Mémoires de Condé, part 3 (The Hague and Paris: Rallin fils, 1743?), 255–56; Mathieu, The Heroyk Life and Deplorable Death of the Most Christian King Henry the Fourth, 39; Pierre de l’Estoile, Mémoires et journal depuis la mort de Henri III (1589) jusqu’en 1611 (Paris: Didier, 1854), 332–33; “Prophétie de Nostradamus,” 40, undated manuscript, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Dupuy 843 (p. 40); Yvonne Bellenger, ed., Pierre de Larivey: Champenois, chanoine, traducteur, auteur de comédies et astrologue (1541–1619) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1993); and Cassan, La grande peur de 1610.

  2   La Perrière, Les considerations des quatre mondes; Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London, 159; Béhar, Langues occultes; Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos; and Russell, “Astrology as Popular Propaganda.”

  3   Pierre de Bourdeilles, lord of Brantôme, Les vies des grands capitaines du siècle dernier, in his Oeuvres complètes, 6:249, 304.

  4   “Nostradamus is a planet”: Chasles, “Nostradamus et ses commentateurs,” 335.

  5   Jean de Chevigny to Nostredame, September 1560, Nostredame to Rosenberger, November 9, 1561, and Chevigny to Nostredame, May 7, 1563, Lettres, 56–58, 97, 146–47; Chevigny, L’Androgyn né à Paris le XXI juillet, MDLXX (Lyon: M. Jove, 1570), [4]. On Chavigny: Gautheret-Comboulot, Les auteurs beaunois du XVIe au XIX^e siècle,131–32; Brind’Amour, introduction to Nostradamus, Premières centuries, lxiii–lxiv; and the works listed in the following note.

  6   The single-author hypothesis is articulated most forcefully by Bernard Chevignard in “L’énigme Chevigny/Chavigny,” and “Jean-Aimé de Chavigny.” For the multiple-author hypothesis, see Dupèbe, introduction to Lettres, 21–22; and Jacques Halbronn, “Contribution aux recherches biographiques sur Michel de Nostredame,”http://bit.ly/mFFsqa. For an overview, see Barbier, “Jean de Chevigny et Jean-Aimé de Chavigny.”

  7   Fontenay, Conjuncion magna de pronosticos, feliz ascendiente de la real sangre de Borbon y francesa monarchia (Barcelona: J. Matevad, 1641), discussed in Halbronn, Le texte prophétique en France, 1211; L’Ancre, L’incredulité et mescreance du sortilège pleinement convaincue, 230; Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 12, 19, 43, 97; and Mirella Conenna and Anna Firenze, “Les signes de Nostradamus: Sur les traductions italiennes des Centuries,” in Bracops, ed., Nostradamus traducteur traduit, 113.

  8   On changes in Nostredame’s text: Brind’Amour, introduction to Premières centuries, xxv; and Chevignard, annotation in Présages, 117.

  9   Gaufridi, Histoire de Provence, 2:526–27. On this prophetic enthusiasm: Drévillon, Lire et écrire l’avenir, 70.

10   Haton, Mémoires, 1: 39–40; Nouvelles et curieuses Prédictions de Michel Nostradamus, pour sept ans, depuis l’année 1800, jusqu’à l’année 1806; Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 47, 56–58; and Wilson, Nostradamus, 182.

11   “I think”: Hubert Languet to Camerarius, February 1, 1563, quoted in Guinard, “Les vignettes de Nostradamus,” http://bit.ly/jyj3pV. See Rosenberger to Nostredame, December 15, 1561, Lettres, 109–15; Nostradamus, Almanach pour l’an MDLXVI, in Cahiers Nostradamus 5–6 (1987–88): 104; and Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile,47.

12   “Impetuous”: L’Estoile, entry of March 1606, Registre-journal de Henri IV, 395. “Three times”: Anon., Centuries de Nostradamus avec l’interprétation (n.p., 1627). See also Anon., “Quatrain rencontré dans les centuries de Nostradamus sur le siège de Sedan par le Roy,” undated manuscript, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms. 3137, fol. 1; Benazra,Répertoire chronologique, 118–20, 157–60, 208–09; and Hawkins, “A Prognostication by Nostradamus in an Unpublished Letter of the Seventeenth Century,” Romanic Review 7 (1916): 224–25.

13   On Seve: Advielle, Document inédits, 12–14; and Benazra, Répertoire chronologique, 162–64. On the editions of Nostradamus’s Prophecies: Guinard, “Historique des éditions des Prophécies de Nostradamus.”

14   “Epitre dédicatoire de Vincent Seve présentée à Henry IV, le 19 mars 1605,” found in many seventeenth-century editions of the Prophecies; Prophéties sur les affaires du temps présent et advenir; and Athénosy family member, untitled interpretation of quatrains [1694?], Bibliothèque municipale d’Avignon, ms. 3194. On Nostradamus as author of the sixains: Lemesurier, Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 95–97. See also Halbronn, Texte prophétique, 970–71.

15   “I don’t know”: Jean de Nostradamus to Scipion Cibo, January 25, 1570, quoted in Guinard, “Les imposteurs et pièces apocryphes sur Nostradamus,” http://bit.ly/iO5QCQ. “Ancestor”: “Discours sur la véritable origine des Moulins à barbe,” in Fournier, Variétés historiques et littéraires, 2:55. See also Nostradamus, Almanach pour l’an M.D.LXVI, in Cahiers Nostradamus 5–6 (1987–88): 102.

16   Nostradamus le Jeune, Présages pour treize ans; and Agrippa d’Aubigné, Histoire universelle, ed. André Thierry, 11 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1981–2000), 4:234.

17   Filippo Nostradamus, La Salutifera; Crespin, Prognostications avec ses Présages, pour l’an MDLXXI, [8]; Anon., Les triolets du temps, selon les visions d’un petit fils du grand Nostradamus; and L’ami de la religion et du roi, November 14, 1827, 32.

18   “Good speculator”: Chavigny, Première face, 21.

19   Ibid., 20–22, 31, 35; and Chavigny, “Vaticination fort ancienne, interprétée du très chréstien Henry IIII, roy de France et de Navarre, et conférée avec les oracles et présages de M. Michel de Nostredame,” n.d., Bibliothèque Méjanes, ms. 451, fol. 395.

20   Chavigny, Première face, 35–38, 50, 110, 210; Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 87–90; and Céard, “J. A. de Chavigny,” 441.

21   “Clearly”: Les vraies Centuries et Prophéties de Maistre Michael Nostradamus (Amsterdam: J. Jansson, 1668), [i–ii]. See Anon., Petit discours ou commentaire sur les Centuries de Maistre Michel Nostradamus; and Calvet, “Les tours de Nostredame,” 171.

22   “Peculiar Genius”: Garencières, The True Prophecies, [ii]. See Le Roux, La clef de Nostradamus, xxxix, 314.

23   “Century’s corruption”: Chavigny, Discours parénétique sur les choses turques, [ii]. “Defining trait”: Chavigny, Première face, 20–21, 40–42.

24   Marion, “Narratologie médiatique,” 71.

25   “Of all the editions”: “Observation sur les prophéties de M. Michel Nostradamus,” Les vraies Centuries et Prophéties de Maistre Michel Nostradamus (Amsterdam: D. Winkermans, 1667), [i]. “Be the source”: Chavigny, Première face, 279, trans. Steven Crumb.

26   The sociologist Daniel Gros discusses the appeal of astrology in his “Le paradoxe de l’astrologue,” in Edgar Morin, ed., La croyance astrologique moderne, 192.

27   Le Roux, Clef de Nostradamus, 466.

28   “Wrapped in wrinkles”: Hugh Latimer, quoted in Ferrell, The Bible and the People, 127. There is a vast literature on the history of the Bible. In addition to Ferrell’s book, I have learned much from Armstrong, The Bible: A Biography; Daniell, The Bible in English; Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution; and Sharpe, “Reading Revelations.”

29   “Advertissement au lecteur,” in Nostradamus le Jeune, Présages pour treize ans, 24; “De l’instruction de M. le Dauphin,” in Oeuvres de François de La Mothe Le Vayer, 1:314; Buget, “Etude sur les prophéties de Nostradamus,” 1702–06; and Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 12.

CHAPTER 6: WONDER AND POLITICS AT THE COURT OF FRANCE

  1   Undated manuscript describing the events, BML ms. 1336–37 (1212), in Tennevin, François Michel, 175.

  2   The best source on Michel and the ghost is Tennevin’s detailed François Michel. I have drawn from it copiously in the paragraphs that follow. I also consulted Saint-Simon, Mémoires, 6:222–27; articles from the Gazette d’Amsterdam (1697), ibid., 6:549; Palamède Tronc de Coudoulet, “Abrégé de l’histoire de Michel Nostradamus” [1701?], 52–64, AMS, copy in box “Nostradamus”; Sourches, Mémoires, 5:260; Callières, Letters, 260; and Achard, Dictionnaire de la Provence, 524–25. Two engravings of the blacksmith are held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes, Hennin 6332 and 6333. On Nostredame’s descendants in Salon: “Voyage fait en Provence 13 avril–18 juin 1671 d’après un manuscrit inédit,” in Louise Godard de Donville, “Découverte de la Provence au XVII^e siècle,” Marseille. Revue municipale trimestrielle 120 (1980): 102.

  3   “This man”: Sourches, Mémoires, 260. The portents in the chapbook were from May and December 1555. See François-Michel Placide, Marechal ferrant, natif de Salon en Provence (n.p., [1697?]), [2].

  4   On ghosts in early modern Europe: Mercier, Leonarde’s Ghost; Maxwell-Stuart, Ghosts; Bruce Gordon and Peter Marshall, eds., The Place of the Dead: Death and Remembrance in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Davies, The Haunted.

  5   Quevedo, Visions; Anon., Description véritable d’un phantosme; Anon., Visions astrologiques de Michel Nostradamus; and Hubert Carrier, La presse de la Fronde (1648–1653): Les Mazarinades, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 1991), 1:299.

  6   This discussion draws from Bynum, “Wonder,” and Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature. I thank Chantal Liaroutzos for sharing her unpublished essay, “Les catastrophes naturelles dans les Antiquités de villes.”

  7   Burns, An Age of Wonders; and Friedman, The Battle of the Frogs and Fairbord’s Flies.

  8   “Numerous wonders”: Nostredame to Rosenberger, September 9, 1561, Lettres, 94–98. “Many strange”: A Collection of Twenty-Three Prophecies and Predictions of the Famous Michael Nostrodamus. See Chavigny, Première face, 18; Anon., Discours merveilleux et mémorable, in Lever, Canards sanglants, 253–55; Anon., Bataille prodigieuse d’une grande quantité d’oyseaux; and Madame de Sévigné to Madame de Grignan, March 11, 1676, in her Correspondance, 2:251–52.

  9   “Something extraordinary”: “Copie d’une lettre écrite de Salon en Provence,” in Tennevin, François Michel, 160.

10   The statistics come from Richard S. Dunn, The Age of Religious Wars, 1559–1715, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1979), 264–65. See John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV: 1667–1714 (New York: Longman, 1999).

11   Anon., Présages émerveillables pour XX ans; Chavigny, “Vaticination fort ancienne,” op.cit., [2–4]; Chavigny, Première face, 40, 50, 283; and Les Pléiades du S. de Chavigny, Beaunois. On political uses of Nostradamus in the late sixteenth century: Halbronn, “Les prophéties et la Ligue,” 124–25. On Chavigny’s politics: Céard, “J. A. De Chavigny,” 436–42; and Poumarède, Pour en finir avec la Croisade, 113–17. On the Great Monarch: Haran, Le lys et le globe.

12   “Unfit”: Anon., L’horoscope de Jules Mazarin, [1].

13   “These are days”: Rabb, Last Days of the Renaissance, 103. This paragraph and the next draw from Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 142–43; Popkin, “Seventeenth-Century Millenarianism,” 112–21; and Williamson, Apocalypse Then, 91–92.

14   Merlin Ambrosius, The Lord Merlin’s Prophecy Concerning the King of Scots, 3–4; John Rogers, Sagrir, or, Doomes-Day Drawing Nigh (London: Hucklescot, 1654), 132; and Rusche, “Prophecies and Propaganda, 1641 to 1651,” 767.

15   “Predictions, or prophecies”: A Collection of Twenty-Three Prophecies, 3. On saints: Moshe Sluhovsky, “La mobilisation des saints dans la Fronde parisienne d’après les Mazarinades,” Annales, 54, no. 2 (1999): 358.

16   Jean Berenger, Léopold 1er, 1640–1705: fondateur de la puissance autrichienne (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 241–42; van der Wall, “‘Antichrist Stormed,’” 162; Faith Wigzell, Reading Russian Fortunes: Print Culture, Gender and Divination in Russia from 1765 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 163; Anon.,Dr Martin Luther’s Prophecies of the Destruction of Rome (Edinburgh, 1679); Philalelos, Good and Joyful News for England; and Atwood, The Wonderful Predictions of Nostradamus.

17   Darryl Dee, Expansion and Crisis in Louis XIV’s France: Franche-Comté and Absolute Monarchy, 1674–1715 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009).

18   “Pleace and plenty”: A Collection of Twenty-Three Prophecies, 7. “Spectacle of horror”: “L’issue funeste du prince d’Orange prédite par Nostradamus,” January 1, 1690, engraving in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes. See Les Vrayes Centuries et Prophéties de Maistre Michel Nostradamus (1667); Massard,Relation exacte, & curieuse des Malheurs extrêmes & prochains; Le Noble, “Nostradamus, ou les oracles,” 9:47; and Drévillon, Lire et écrire l’avenir, 203–05. On glory and propaganda: Moriceau, “Le Coq et l’Orange”; and Préaud, Les effets du soleil, 21–29.

19   “Famous French prophet”: John Ray, Observations Topographical, Moral, & Physiological Made in a Journey Through Part of the Low-Countries, Germany, Italy, and France (London: J. Martyn, 1673), 465. “Prophet of their own”: Anon., The Fortune of France, 16. “A triumphant reign”: Les Vrayes Centuries et Prophéties de Maistre Michel Nostradamus (Rouen: B. Gyrin, 1710), quoted in Benazra, Répertoire chronologique, 29. “Indispensable”: Espitalier, Les Oracles secrets de Nostradamus, 4–5.

20   “Is thought”: “Copie d’une lettre écrite de Salon en Provence,” in Tennevin, François Michel, 161.

21   “That is assured”: “Chanson nouvelle” [1698], in Tennevin, François Michel, 164. See François-Michel Placide, Marechal ferrant, natif de Salon en Provence, [1]; and Henri Duclos, Mademoiselle de La Vallière et Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, femme de Louis XIV, 2 vols. (Paris: Didier, 1870), 2:980.

22   “Good and joyful news”: Philalelos, Good and Joyful News for England, 3. See Jean Bernier, “Jugements ou nouvelles observations sur les oeuvre grecques, latines, toscanes et françaises de maître François Rabelais,” 1697, quoted in Tennevin, François Michel, 80–81; and The Works of Sir William Temple, 2:486–87. On the Maintenon plot: Achard, Dictionnaire de la Provence, 525.

23   Letter from Salon, published in Gazette d’Amsterdam, in Tennevin, François Michel, 158.

24   Jean-Baptiste Colbert to cardinal Mazarin, February 18, 1656, in Colbert, Lettres, instructions et mémoires, 1:239–40; and Gacon, Le poète sans fard, contenant satires, épitres et épigrammes. On official concerns: Anon., Procès, examen, confessions et négations du méchant et exécrable parricide François Ravaillac, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1611), inSupplément aux Mémoires de Condé, 3rd part (n.p., n.d.), 257; and unidentified article dated May 20, 1697, in Saint-Simon, Mémoires, 6:550. On taxation revolts: Yves-Marie Bercé, History of Peasant Revolts: The Social Origins of Rebellion in Early Modern France, trans. Amanda Whitmore (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).

25   His will and pawnshop records are reproduced in Tennevin, François Michel, 76–78, 211–12.

26   “The troops”: William Perwich to Lord Arlington, July 29, 1670, in Perwich, Despatches, 104. See Isaac de Larrey, Histoire de France sous le règne de Louis XIV, 9 vols. (Rotterdam: M. Bohm, 1738), 2:443. On astrology’s declining legitimacy: Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 111–12, 126–27; and Drévillon, Lire et écrire l’avenir,178, 224, 236. The monarchy’s change of course owed much to the Affair of the Poisons (1679), in which the police uncovered a community of alchemists, fortune-tellers, and magicians who sold poisons and charms that some nobles had used against the king.

27   “Fodder”: François de Callières to marquise d’Huxelles, April 22, 1697, Callières, Letters, 249. See Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, 578; and article dated March 22, 1697, Gazette d’Amsterdam, in Saint-Simon, Mémoires, 6:547.

28   “Nostredame to the princes”: Gimon, Chroniques de la ville de Salon, 564–65. On the 1701 visit to Salon: “Journal de toutes les affaires de la commune depuis l’année 1699 1700 1701,” fol. 11, AM Salon BB19 bis; and Levantal, La route des Princes, 110. See also Villars, Mémoires, 141.

CHAPTER 7: AMAZING BONES

  1   This paragraph and the next draw from Gimon, Chroniques de la ville de Salon, 708, 718–19; Claude Badet, La Révolution en Provence (Avignon: A. Barthélemy, 1989); Joseph Megy, “Notice sur Michel Nostradamus,” February 7, 1818, Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, 6 M 1610; Buget, “Etude sur Nostradamus,” 1863, 523; and Le Normand, Souvenirs prophétiques d’une Sibylle, 333.

  2   See, for instance, the account given in Delumeau, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1971).

  3   “Erroneous”: Belier de Saint-Brisson, Accomplissement d’une prophétie de Nostradamus, 2. See Belier de Saint-Brisson, Epistre au Roy, quoting sixain 48; Count Moszynski, Voyage en Provence d’un Gentilhomme polonais (1784–1785), ed. Fernand Benoit (Marseille: Institut historique de Provence, 1930), 48–49; and Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 146. On provincial censorship of the Prophecies: Mellot, L’édition rouennaise et ses marchés, 597.

  4   “A great nation”: Brun, “Nostradamus Centurie 53” [1721?], Bibliothèque municipale d’Avignon, ms. 3188, fol. 1. See Journal des débats, October 19, 1881; Dinet, “Les bibliothèques monastiques,” 296; Pierre Goubert, The Ancien Régime: French Society, 1600–1750, trans. Steve Cox (New York: Harper, 1969), 172, 176; and Buvat,Journal de la Régence, 1:437.

  5   “If the famed”: entry dated March 1744 in Barbier, Chronique de la régence et du règne de Louis XV, 495. See Pluquet, Dictionnaire des hérésies, 2:848.

  6   The best expression of this view is Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘the Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed.” See also Edelstein, The Super-Enlightenment; and Darnton’s pioneering Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France.

  7   For a thorough account of the king’s flight and the panic that ensued: Timothy Tackett, When the King Took Flight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

  8   “All of Paris”: Journal de Paris, May 1, 1790, quoted in Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment, 131. “The greatest”: Rouy l’aîné, Le magicien républicain, 18. See Laroche, Prophéties pour temps de crise, 65; Anon., L’astrologue patriote; Journal de la cour et de la ville 45 (April 14, 1792): 359–60; and The World, February 22, 1790.

  9   “Beginning”: Epistle to Henri II, Prophecies, 203.

10   “Truth to triumph”: Nouveaux et vrais pronostics de Michel Nostradamus … Pour huit ans, à commencer en l’année 1793 jusqu’à l’année 1800 inclusivement, 2. See Boussemart, Grande arrivée de Nostradamus à Paris, 2; Rouy l’aîné, Le magicien républicain, 77–78; Journal historique et littéraire, February 1, 1792, 233–34, quoted in Benazra, Répertoire chronologique, 336; and Weber, Apocalypses, 110–14.

11   Tronc de Coudoulet, Abrégé de la vie et de l’histoire de Michel Nostradamus, 44; and Claude Jordan, Voyages historiques en France, 8 vols. (Paris: P. Abouyn, 1693–1700), 1:17–18.

12   Haitze, La vie de Michel Nostradamus, 135–37; Chavigny, Première face, 5; Guynaud, La concordance des Prophéties de Nostradamus, 27; Garencières, True Prophecies, [vii]; and Paul Lucas, Troisième voyage du sieur Paul Lucas dans le Levant: mai 1714–novembre 1717, ed. Henri Duranton (Saint-Etienne: Presses Universitaires de Saint-Etienne, 2004), 25–26.

13   Pepys, Diary, 460; Nouvelles et curieuses prédictions de Michel Nostradamus, pour sept ans, depuis l’année 1778, jusqu’à l’année 1785 (Salon: 1778), 5–6; and “New Prediction Said to Be Found at the Opening of the Tomb of Michael Nostradamus” [1713?], British Library, ms. Sloane 3722.

14   “Amazing bones”: Anon., Relation divertissante d’un voyage fait en Provence, 65. See Le Journal de la cour et de la ville, January 9, 1792, 71; Knight, Merlin, 110; and Mauss, A General Theory of Magic, 51.

15   Peter McPhee, Living the French Revolution, 1789–1799 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 144.

16   Gimon, Chroniques de la ville de Salon, 706; and Buget, “Etude sur Nostradamus,” 1863, 523. On the National Guard: Serge Bianchi and Roger Dupuy, eds., La garde nationale entre nation et peuple en armes (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006); and Michael L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Club of Marseilles, 1790–1794 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973), 82–95.

17   D’Odoucet, Révolution française, quotation on 9; and Nouveaux et vrais pronostics de Michel Nostradamus Pour huit ans, à commencer en l’année 1793 jusqu’à l’année 1800 inclusivement.

18   “This unjust”: Les vraies Centuries, présages et prédictions de Maistre Michel Nostradamus (Antwerp: P. van Duren 1792), 271 (this quatrain was an imitation). “Let heaven”: Journal général de la cour et de la ville, April 28 and July 1, 1790, quoted in Garrett, Respectable Folly, 45–46. See also Anon., Prophétie de Nostradamus accomplie.

19   “It will all go”: Miller, Memoir of the Rev. Charles Nisbet, D.D., 84, 222, 311–12. See Diesbach de Belleroche, commentary on “Prophétie de Nostradamus, publiée en 1790, par Durofoi,” ms. 1790, traces-ecrites.com; and Proceedings of the French National Assembly, April 24, 1792, in Jérôme Madival and Emile Laurent, eds., Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, 1st ser., 82 vols. (Paris: Dupont, 1862–96), 42:354–55.

20   “Modern Nostradamus”: Olympe de Gouges, “Response to the Justification of Robespierre. Addressed to Jérôme Pétion. November 1792,” in Writings by Pre-Revolutionary French Women, ed. Anne R. Larsen and Colette H. Winn (New York: Routledge, 1999), 567. “Imaginings”: proceedings of the Convention, June 15, 1794, in Philippe Buchez and Pierre-Célestin Roux-Lavergne, eds., Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, 40 vols. (Paris: Paulin, 1834–38), 38:255.

21   “Step beyond”: Edwards, Cometomantia, 230–31. See Menestrier, Philosophie des images, 385–89; and Drévillon, Lire et écrire l’avenir, 251.

22   “Fear of invisible”: Jean-François de Saint-Lambert, Catéchisme universel, appended to Cadmus, A, B, C, abécédairo nouveau, conforme au principe adopté par l’Institut national (Paris: F. Bonneville, Year VII), 73. On early modern supersitition: Cambers, “Demonic Possession, Literacy and ‘Superstition’ in Early Modern England”; and Revel, “Forms of Expertise,” 256–64.

23   “Owed their success”: Abbé de Laporte, Abbé de Fontenai, and Louis Domairon, Le voyageur françois, ou la connoissance de l’ancien et du nouveau monde, 42 vols. (Paris: Moutard, 1765–96), 29:391.

24   “Old matrons”: Gildon, The Post-Boy Rob’d of his Mail, 234–35. “So disdained”: Gayot de Pitaval, Bibliothèque de cour, de ville et de campagne, 6:191. “Needed to terrorize”: Joseph Lavallée, Voyage dans les départements de la France (Paris: Brion, 1792–1802), 27. See Achard, Dictionnaire de la Provence, 2:8–11.

25   On reason and magic, see Styers’s rich Making Magic.

26   On the intermingling of elite and popular cultures: Goulemot, “Démons, merveilles et philosophie à l’âge classique.” On enduring doubts: Brockliss and Jones, Medical World, 282–83.

27   Joseph Cérutti, Les jardins de Betz. Poème accompagné de notes instructives.… 2nd ed. (Paris: Desenne, 1792), 36.

28   Ariès, The Hour of Our Death; and Emmanuel Fureix, La France des larmes: deuils politiques à l’âge romantique (1814–1840) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2009), 85–93.

29   “Rigid embrace”: Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial,” 1850. Bourke discusses this poem and these developments in Fear, 29–49. On these fears, see also Dickey, Cranioklepty; Bondeson, Buried Alive; and Martin Pernick, “Back from the Grave: Recurring Controversies Over Defining and Diagnosing Death in History,” in Richard M. Zaner, ed., Death: Beyond Whole-Brain Criteria (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988), 17–74.

30   “I had promised”: Anon., Nouvelles Prophéties de Nostradamus ressucité, aux Parisiens, 3. “The great secret”: Martonne, “Etudes historiques: Nostradamus,” 283–84.

31   On the early presence of Nostradamus in songs: Tourangeau, Le second livre des chansons folastres et prologues, 25. See also Taconet, “Nostradamus, Parodie de Zoroastre”; Collot d’Herbois, Le nouveau Nostradamus, ou les Fêtes provencales; André Tissier, Les spectacles à Paris pendant la Revolution: répertoire analytique, chronologique et bibliographique, 2 vols. (Geneva: Droz, 2002), 2:212–18; Alphonse Aulard, Paris pendant la réaction thermidorienne et sous le Directoire, 5 vols. (Paris: L. Cerf, 1898–1902), 1:88; and Nathalie Rizzoni, “De l’origine théâtrale de Gil Blas,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 103 (2003): 823–45.

32   “Resolutions of the fates”: Le Sage and d’Orneval, Le Tombeau de Nostradamus, 1:173.

33   “All that people” and “commoners”: Ménétra, Journal of my Life, 77. Thanks to Paul Cohen for this reference. On the domestication of the supernatural: Walsham, “Reformation and ‘the Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed,” 518–19; and Schmidt, “From Demon Possession to Magic Show,” 304.

34   The anecdote about Henri IV, which the king himself reportedly told, circulated as early as 1589. Still, it may be apocryphal. See l’Estoile, August 1589, Registre-journal de Henri IV, 5; and Marguerite de Valois, Mémoires, 279–80.

35   Le Sage and d’Orneval, Le Tombeau de Nostradamus, 175; Christelle Bahier-Porte, La poétique d’Alain-René Lesage (Paris: H. Champion, 2006), 387–88; and Prothero, American Jesus, 72–78.

36   Archives littéraires de l’Europe 14 (1807?): 297; Grey River Argus 14 (January 15, 1874): 4; John Lorenz Mosheim, An Ecclesiastic History, Ancient and Modern, 6 vols. (London: Vernor & Hood, Poultry, 1803), 3:209; and Walter, Merlin, 172.

37   Jaulnay, L’enfer burlesque, 57.

38   “Tomb of the prophet”: The Wizard, iii.

39   “By metaplasm”: Ward, “Nostradamus,” 609–10. See Almanach pittoresque, comique & prophétique pour 1851, 37.

40   This account rests on the proceedings of Salon’s municipal council, September 29, and November 6, 1791, AM Salon I D 1/1 and I D 1/2; Moulin, La propriété foncière, 258–59; Le tout-Salon: Revue annuelle (Marseille, 1897): 48–55; and Gimon, Chroniques de la ville de Salon, 717–18. Nostradamus’s new epitaph can be found in Millin,Voyage dans les départemens du midi de la France, 4:61–62. The original was restored two decades later, when the Bourbon dynasty returned to power.

41.. “Iron clasped”: The Wizard, vii. “Picture of furor”: Journal des débats, June 17, 1834. These tales come from Almanach des gens de bien pour l’année 1795 (1794): 204; Quarterly Review 23 (1820): 357; Bonnelier, Nostradamus, roman; Berin, “Michel Nostradamus,” 70; and Halévy, La Mort de Nostradamus, 20. On the Gothic: Jerrold E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3–8.

42   Journal de Paris, March 31, 1806.

CHAPTER 8: A WORLD OF ONE’S OWN

  1   “Magnificient”: Pasquier to Airault, in Pasquier, Lettres historiques pour les années 1556–1594, 362. “Stained and ragged”: Anon., “My Grandmother’s Books,” Atlantic Monthly 472 (1897): 286. See Prion, Pierre Prion, scribe, 95–97.

  2   Bynum, “Wonder,” 14–15.

  3   Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, esp. chap. 4.

  4   “Meant to say”: Anon., “Affaires des Turcs tant passées que présentes et futures depuis l’an 1555 jusques à l’avènement de l’Antechrist, selon ce qu’en a presagé Michel Nostredame dans ses dix centuries,” BML ms. 992.

  5   “When you read”: William Drake, quoted in Sharpe, Reading Revolutions, 84. See Anon., “Livre d’astrologie par un noble vénitien” [sixteenth century?], Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms. 8514, folio 86. On humanist reading: Grafton, “The Humanist as Reader,” in Cavallo and Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West, 198–209; Jackson,Marginalia; and Blair, “Reading Strategies.”

  6   On marginalia in early modern Bibles: William H. Sherman, “‘The Book Thus Put in Every Vulgar Hand’: Impressions of Readers in Early English Printed Bibles,” in Saenger and Van Kampen, eds., The Bible as Book, 125–33.

  7   “Interest of his work”: Paul Valéry, “Homage to Marcel Proust,” in his Masters and Friends, trans. Martin Turnell (Princeton: Bollingen Foundation, 1968), 298.

  8   “More things”: Nostradamus, Almanach pour l’an M.D.LXVI, in Cahiers Nostradamus 5–6 (1987–88): 102. See Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos, 201.

  9   See the respective positions of Norbert Elias, The Society of Individuals, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 78; Lillqvist and Lindeman, “Belief in Astrology as a Strategy for Self-Verification,” 203–06; and Baecher, “Phénomène prophétique et schémas eschatologiques,” 37.

10   On locus: Vyse, Believing in Magic, 50–57. On such journeys during the Renaissance: Cave, “The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance.”

11   “Whoever will apply”: Les Vrayes Centuries et Prophéties de Maistre Michel Nostradamus (Amsterdam, 1667), n.p. “I had rather”: Garencières, True Prophecies of Michael Nostradamus, 81. Garencières did, however, restrict such interventions to learned readers, whom he expected to avoid the future and “business of state.”

12   The prince to whom Denys II referred was Charles de Lorraine. Léon’s travel journals also mention ghosts and demons. On Denys II: Anon., “De la comparaison des prédictions de Nostradamus, avec les prédictions de l’Abbé Joachim [de Flore], d’après les discours tenus par le P. Michaelis en son petit couvent du collège de Boissy près Saint André des Arts le 25 juillet 1612,” Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Godefroy 15, fol. 223–24; and Anon., “Centurie sixième de Nostradamus, quatrain quarente trois,” undated manuscript, Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, Godefroy 329, fol. 43. Caroline R. Sherman contextualizes all of this in “The Genealogy of Knowledge,” esp. 94, 239. I am grateful to her for sharing her unpublished notes on the Godefroy family and Nostradamus.

13   “Explanations”: Anon., “Eclaircissements ou Explications des véritables quatrains de Maistre Michel Nostradamus … spécialement pour la connoissance des choses futures depuis MXCIVI jusques à MDCLXX,” 1656, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ms. NAF 11548. “Strange and extraordinary”: Anon., “Prophéties de Michel Nostradamus sur les révolutions présentes d’Angleterre” [1694?], Bibliothèque municipale d’Avignon, ms. 3194. Annotations can be found in Les Prophéties de. M. Michel Nostradamus (Troyes, 1628), copy sold at the Swann Auction Galleries, November 8, 2007; and Les Vrayes Centuries et Prophéties de Maistre Michel Nostradamus,(Amsterdam: Winkermans, 1667), 36, copy of the BML. On Bonnie Prince Charlie: Joseph Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts and Letters (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1818), 401.

14   “Is it not”: Mathieu Marais to Jean Bouhier, October 15, 1727, Correspondance littéraire du président Bouhier. 2:166. See Chartier, “Publishing Strategies,” 152–58; Gouberville, Un Sire de Gouberville, 210; and John Newman to Abraham Hill, August 19, 1659, The Monthly Review, 1767, 446.

15   On this burden: Shepheard, “Pour une poétique du genre oraculaire,” 63.

16   Henry Krystal, “Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow-Up,” in Caruth, ed., Trauma, 80; Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth, 49–52, 157; and Suzanne M. Miller, “Why Having Control Reduces Stress: If I Can Stop the Roller Coaster, I Don’t Want to Get Off,” in Garber and Seligman, eds., Human Helplessness, 86–89.

17   “Nature was not”: Clark, “French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture,” 84. On pessimism as meaningful: Dienstag, Pessimism.

18   “It is above all”: Anon., Prophéties politiques de Michel Nostradamus sur les républicains rouges et les socialistes, 99. “The only certain thing”: Moré, Mémoires, 132.

19   “Saddest”: Tomalin, Samuel Pepys, 225. “Apocalyptic and mysterious”: John Booker, New Almanack and Prognostication (London, 1666), quoted in Tinniswood, By Permission of Heaven, 21. On Pepys and the Fire of London, see Minois, Histoire de l’avenir, 392; and Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 103–04.

20   “I have never lived” and “It is strange”: Tomalin, Samuel Pepys, 168, 227. “Most horrid”: Pepys, quoted in Daly, “Samuel Pepys and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,” 65.

21   “Despise that stanza”: Tenison, The Creed of Mr. Hobbes, 62. See Pepys, Diary, 460; Windham Sandys to a “lord,” September 6, 1666, in The Gentleman’s Magazine 51 (July 1831): 6; and Thomas Vincent, God’s Terrible Voice in the City of London (Cambridge: S. Green, 1667), 25.

22   On magic, precedents, and conditioning: Vyse, Believing in Magic, 60, 75, 199.

23   “It is a strange thing”: Pepys, Diary, 417. “Put a century”: Marquis de Condorcet, “Sur l’instruction publique” (1791) quoted in Nelson, “The Weapon of Time,” 233. On time and the French Revolution: Nelson, ibid., 3–7, 30–35, 233–43; Hunt, “The World We Have Gained,” 4–6; and Hunt, Measuring Time, 69–71.

24   “It’s odd”: Hélène Berr, Journal 1942–1944 (Paris: Tallendier, 2008), 182. Berr was not talking about Nostradamus. This distinction between fear and anxiety is drawn in Bourke, Fear, esp. 189–91.

25   “People feel worse”: Daniel Gilbert, “What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous,” New York Times, May 21, 2009. This paragraph and the following distill a wide body of research. See Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, chap. 1; Keinan, “The Effects of Stress and Desire for Control on Superstitious Behavior”; Langer, “The Illusion of Control”; Damisch et al., “Keep Your Fingers Crossed!”; and Taylor and Brown, “Illusions and Well-Being.”

26   Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, 17.

27   “Listening”: Diesbach de Belleroche, Une éducation manquée, 83, trans. Joshua Jordan. This Diesbach may be a descendant of the nobleman who consulted Nostradamus during the revolution (chapter 7). See Shelley E. Taylor, “Adjustment to Threatening Events: A Theory of Cognitive Adaptation,” American Psychologist 38, no. 11 (November 1983): 1165; and Sonja Lyubomirsky, “Why We’re Still Happy,” New York Times, December 26, 2008.

28   On the Apocalypse and community: O’Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse, 6, 199; and Williamson, Apocalypse Then, 2–3.

29   Pierre François Chiflet to the baron de Saffre, November 5, 1659, in Morrison, Collection of Autograph Letters and Historical Documents, 2:201; and Anon., Lettre d’un seigneur anglois à un seigneur irlandois, 3–4.

30   “To pass the time”: Cardinal Farnèse, quoted in Brind’Amour, Nostradamus astrophile, 33. “Jokers”: Bachaumont, Mémoires secrets, 217. Nostradamus may have provided entertainment among the populace as well, but traces are once again elusive. See Guy Patin to Charles Spon, March 8, 1644, in Patin, Lettres, 1:378; and Bachaumont,Mémoires secrets, 340. On aristocratic entertainment: Drévillon, Lire et écrire l’avenir, 87–89; and Lilti, Le monde des salons, chap. 7.

31   “Nostradamus as you render him”: Frederick the Great to the Count of Manteuffel, January 10, 1736, in Oeuvres de Frédéric le Grand, 25:408. See Menestrier, Philosophie des images, 387; and Le Causeur: ambigu littéraire, critique, moral et philosophique 1 (Paris: Ferra jeune, 1817), 309–10.

32   “My pastime”: Chanoine Penez to a lackey, February 26, 1694, in Advielle, Documents inédits, 11. See Abbé Lebeuf to Claude Prévost, June 28, 1722, in Lettres de l’abbé Lebeuf (Aix-en-Provence: G. Perriquet, 1866–68), 316–17; and Anon., “Prophéties de Michel Nostradamus sur la Rochelle” [1718?], Bibliothèque municipale de La Rochelle, ms. 153.

33   Advielle, Documents inédits, 10; and Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de M. Pierre-Antoine Bolongaro-Crevenna (Amsterdam: D. J. Changuion, 1789).

34   “They are not”: Anon., “Lettre écrite en réponse à un de mes amis, qui me demandait ce que je pensois de Nostradamus” (eighteenth century), Bibliothèque nationale de France, ms. français 12294.

35   This account rests on Rolland, Journey Within, 64–66; and Romain Baron, “Jean-Baptiste Boniard (1768–1843),” Mémoires de la Société académique du Nivernais 62 (1980): 23–38.

36   “Utter”: Le Causeur (1817), 310. “Rare and curious”: Catalog of the Curious and Extensive Library of the Late James Bindley (London: 1818). “Amusing book”: Catalog of a Library Constituting the Collections of the Late Peter Hastie and the Late Edward H. Tracy (New York: 1877), 244. See Arthur Dinaux, annotation (1843) on the cover page of Guynaud, Concordance des Prophéties, personal collection of the author; Catalogue des livres composant la bibliothèque poétique de M. Viollet le Duc (Paris: Hachette, 1843), 241–43; and Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 218–31, 349.

37   Chavigny, Première face, 276; and Catalogue de la partie réservée de la bibliothèque de feu Mr. J. Renard, de Lyon (Paris: A. Claudin, 1884), 72. On the written work and pleasure: Coleman, Public Reading and the Reading Public, 171, 176; and Dubois, L’imaginaire de la Renaissance, 41–42.

38   “From time to time”: Partridge, Remarkable Predictions.

39   “The hand” and “What to ascribe”: The Predictions of Nostradamus Before the Year 1558, 8.

CHAPTER 9: WE ARE NOT NOSTRADAMITES!

  1   “Can a serious person”: La Phalange 10, no. 3 (1841): 324. “Below”: La Presse, November 24, 1840. On this revival: Lucius, “La littérature visionnaire en France,” 256–59; Edelman, Histoire de la voyance et du paranomal, 40–69; and Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 245–47.

  2   Journal des débats, August 31, 1815.

  3   Bouys, Nouvelles considérations; and Chaillot, Les vraies Centuries et prophéties de Maistre Michel Nostradamus.

  4   Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam to Gustave Flaubert, 1864, in Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Correspondance, ed. Joseph Bollery, 2 vols. (Paris: Mercure de France, 1962), 1:66–67; and Normand, L’abbé Rigaux, 5.

  5   The best book on this transformation is Vaillant and Thérenty, 1836, l’an I de l’ère médiatique.

  6   “Most of the concierges”: “French Almanacks,” All the Year Round (February 9, 1878), 65. On Bareste, see the sketch in Journal des arts, des sciences et des lettres, January 12, 1859; and Mustafa, “Republican Socialism.”

  7   “To check”: Perrot, Lettres sur Nismes et le Midi, 134–35. The anecdote about the crown prince comes from the reputed historian Auguste Geoffroy, “Des intérêts du Nord Scandinave dans la guerre d’Orient,” Revue des deux mondes, 1856, 732. See Salgues, Des erreurs et des préjugés, 2:xi; and Commercial Advertiser, August 6, 1817. The translation of quatrain 8.57 is mine.

  8   “The most up-to-date survey on popular almanacs is Lüsebrink et al., Lectures du peuple; though Bollème’s older Almanachs populaires remains valuable. See Nouveaux et Vrais Pronostics de Michel Nostradamus, calculés & supputés très-exactement d’après les observations des Anciens, pour cinq ans, à commencer en l’année 1832, jusqu’à l’année 1836 (Avignon: n.p., [1831?]); and the inventory of books approved by the préfecture of the Vosges for November 1853, AN F18 554.

  9   “Almanacs have undergone”: Draft of a directive on grocers and haberdashers who sell almanacs (1858?), AN F18 554. See Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, 207; and Revue méridionale 4, no. 50 (1857): 1.

10   “If Europeans”: Almanach prophétique, pittoresque et utile pour 1842 (1841): 10–11.

11   “French society”: Le Mémorial d’Aix, May 13, 1850. “Several old prophecies”: Raikes, A Portion of the Journal, 4:47. See Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 21 (1840): 737–38; Bareste, Nostradamus, 239; Bareste, Prophéties; and Buget, “Etude sur Nostradamus,” 1863, 583–86.

12   “Mystery”: Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, 210–11, trans. Steven Crumb.

13   “They take on”: Le Patriote de l’Ain, November 26, 1839. See Maistre, Saint-Petersburg Dialogues, 340; documents reproduced in La Légitimité 25 (1907): 226–29; prosecutor of Montpellier to the Minister of Justice, November 22, 1843, AN BB18 1417; La Gazette de France, March 5, 1839; and Girault, Le passé, le présent et l’avenir,39–41.

14   Eugène Bareste, A tous les citoyens: Du droit de réponse dans les journaux (Paris: Lavigne, 1841); Bareste, “Nécessité d’une politique nouvelle,” Almanach prophétique, pittoresque et utile pour 1848 (1847): 16–20; and Mustafa, “Republican Socialism,” 18–19.

15   Paul Bénichou, Le sacre de l’écrivain, 1750–1830: essai sur l’avènement d’un pouvoir spirituel dans la France moderne (Paris: J. Corti, 1973).

16   “I absolutely need”: Bareste to L. Pommier, n.d., AN 454 AP 21. This discussion rests on three files on Bareste in the Archives Nationales: 454 AP 21, F17 2935/2, and F17 3114/2.

17   Inventory of books approved by the Bureau de l’estampillage in December 1867, AN F18 555; and Hélène Landre, “Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre (1805–1854): le combat pour la République d’un libraire éditeur oublié,” Trames 10 (2002). On self-made individuals in this realm: Albanese, A Republic of Mind & Spirit, 235–37; Verter, “Dark Star Rising,” 266–68; and Curry, A Confusion of Prophets, 48–60.

18   “Nostradamite” and “trash pamphlets”: Bareste, Nostradamus, 31, ii. See Memoirs Read Before the Anthropological Society of London 1 (1863–64): 392.

19   “Fatal”: Almanach prophétique, pittoresque et utile pour 1844 (1843): 14. “Shivers”: E. Brossard, “Centuries de Nostradamus mises en vers français nouveau style,” undated manuscript, consulted at the Swann Auction Galleries, New York City, November 8, 2007. See also Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture, 23–26.

20   “Everyone”: Bareste, Nostradamus, i; also see, 251–52, 478.

21   “Before ending”: Almanach prophétique, pittoresque et utile pour 1841 (1840): 159.

22   “There is no point”: Nau, Le Nostradamus moderne, [6]. On irony: Ten-Doesschate Chu, The Most Arrogant Man in France, 76; and Thérenty, La littérature au quotidien, 153–64. I am grateful to Judith Lyon-Caen for sharing her thoughts on this question.

23   “Superstitious dreamer”: Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country 21 (1840): 737–38.

24   The journalist was the well-known Catholic Louis Veuillot. See Minerva: Ein Journal historischen und politischen Inhalts 1 (1840); Notes and Queries 4 (1851): 140; Edmond Texier, Histoire des journaux, biographie des journalistes (Paris: Pagnerre, 1850), 152; L’Ami de la religion (December 10, 1842), 494; Flora Tristan, Le tour de France: Journal inédit, 1843–1844, ed. Jules L. Puech (Paris: Editions Têtes de Feuilles, 1973), 189; and Louis Veuillot to Eugène Veuillot, August 26, 1848, in Veuillot, Correspondance, 4:170.

25   “One can be”: Leibniz, Esprit de Leibniz, 70. See Pasquier, Lettres historiques pour les années 1556–1594, 376; and François de Callières to marquise d’Huxelles, April 22, 1697, Callières, Letters, 249. On the Enlightenment’s ambivalence, see Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘the Disenchantment of the World,’” 526.

26   “For all the airs”: Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris, 207, trans. Steven Crumb. “But secretly”: Atlanta Constitution, June 1, 1941. See Moszynski, Voyage en Provence d’un Gentilhomme Polonais, vii–viii; Journal des débats, August 31, 1815; Abbé Guillois, Essai sur les superstitions (Lille: L. Lefort, 1836), 35, quoted in Minois,Histoire de l’avenir, 470; and Seabrook, Witchcraft, 366.

27   Miller, Memoir of the Rev. Charles Nisbet, 222. This discussion is indebted to Campbell, “Half-Belief”; and Warner, No Go the Bogeyman. See also Lena Petrossian, “La croyance,” in Morin, ed., Croyance astrologique moderne, 113–14. On self-mocking and the supernatural, see Bown ed., The Victorian Supernatural, 1.

28   “Thrill”: Diesbach de Belleroche, Une éducation manquée, 82. On artful deception: Cook, The Arts of Deception, 16. For other thoughts on play and fear: Serge Moscovici, “La crainte du contact,” in Paillard, Peurs, 39; and Bourke, Fear, 386.

29   “More than ever”: Almanach de l’ère nouvelle, historique et prophétique pour 1849, 102.

30   John Bull, September 1, 1849, and March 9, 1850; Mustafa, “Republican Socialism,” 16; and Peter McPhee, “La République (1848–1851),” in Edgar Leon Newman and Robert Lawrence Simpson, eds., Historical Dictionary of France from the 1815 Restoration to the Second Empire, 2 vols. (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1987), 2:886–87.

31   “Eugène Bareste de Nostradamus”: Les coulisses, December 24, 1840. See Bareste to Abel-François Villemain, January 21, 1843, AN F17 3114/2; La Presse, August 29, 1840; and Fortunatus, Le Rivarol de 1842 (Paris, 1843), 20.

32   “Old friend”: New York Times, April 15, 1872. “Let us essay”: “Prophetic Fits,” 162–64. “Let our readers”: “Nostradamus,” Household Words 12 (October 1855): 298. This paragraph also rests on New York Times, February 23, 1878; La Presse, July 6, 1883; Pall Mall Magazine, July 20, 1899; Charpentier, “Nostradamus et ses prophéties,” 81; and La Croix, May 2, 1931.

33   “But there is”: Chicago Daily Tribune, October 5, 1941. The Daily Mail said essentially the same thing decades later: “Believe what you like, Nostradamus still grasps the public imagination,” June 10, 1995. See also Dominique Kalifa, L’encre et le sang: récits de crimes (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 294–95.

CHAPTER 10: FIN DE SIÈCLE MADNESS

  1   Schivelbuch, The Railway Journey, 191.

  2   This paragraph and the following draw from Timothée, “L’abbé Torné et le merveilleux,” L’Echo du merveilleux 13 (October 1, 1909): 372–75; Multon, “Temps sont proches,” 3:610–12; and Chevignard, introduction to Présages, 47.

  3   Henri Torné-Chavigny, Almamach du ‘Grand Prophète’ Nostradamus pour 1878, 1877, 113. See Mayeur, “Monseigneur Dupanloup et Louis Veuillot,” 194.

  4   Courrier des Etats-Unis, September 29, 1861; Wisconsin Patriot, December 5, 1863; The Crisis, November 21, 1861; and Daily True Delta, October 20, 1861. This discussion has benefited from an exchange with Antonio Urias.

  5   “The country fell”: Suttner, Lay Down Your Arms, 411. See Bois, “Comment je suis devenu sceptique,” 554–56; New York Times, April 15, 1872; and Almanach des Prophéties, 1871, 81. On the apocalyptic climate in France: Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart; and Multon, “Temps sont proches,” 1:22–25, 49–53.

  6   “Hotheaded”: Bois, “Comment je suis devenu sceptique,” 556. See Torné-Chavigny, Les Blancs & les Rouges, 16; Le Français, July 20, 1874; Torné-Chavigny to Raoul de Tricqueville, June 7, 1879, in Nostradamus, Les significations de l’Eclipse, qui sera le 16 septembre 1559 (Méricout, 1904), preamble; and Airiau, “Le Grand Monarque,” 77.

  7   “I will find him”: Torné-Chavigny, Ce qui sera!, 20. “With a verse”: Torné-Chavigny, Réédition du livre des prophéties de Nostradamus publié en 1566 (Bordeaux: J. Dupuy, 1862), 6, trans. Steven Crumb.

  8   “How strange”: Torné-Chavigny, Ce qui sera!, 57. See Hugo, Propos de table de Victor Hugo, 104–05.

  9   I draw my information on Zévaco from Demars, “Michel Zévaco et le roman feuilleton”; Sarah Mombert, “Profession: romancier populaire,” in Artiaga, ed., Le roman populaire, 60–71; and Bastaire, “Pour saluer Zévaco,” 151–52.

10   “Novel full of magic”: Le Matin, April 5, 1907. On the mass press and Le Matin: Martin, Médias et journalistes de la République; and Palmer, Des petits journaux aux grandes agences. On popular novels: Thérenty, Littérature au quotidien, 51. See proceedings of the board of Le Matin, September 20, 1906, AN 1 AR 9.

11   “During your descent”: Zévaco, Nostradamus, 109, trans. Steven Crumb.

12   Béraud and Valory, Nostradamus; Balzac, About Catherine de Medici, 241; and “Nostradamus, the Wizard of France,” Boys of England (January 2, 1891): 44–46.

13   On this cultic milieu and Spiritualism (known as spiritism in France): Campbell, “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization,” 14–15; Albanese, Republic of Mind, 258–79; Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 86; Sharp, Secular Spirituality; and Monroe, Laboratories of Faith.

14   Demars, “Michel Zévaco,” 76, 522; Horowitz, Occult America, 51–53; and Jean-Marcel Humbert, ed., Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730–1930 (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1994).

15   On theosophy and Nostradamus: Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled, 1:260; Sphinx: Monatschift für die geschichtliche und experimentale Begründung der übersinnlichen Weltanschauung 2 (1887): 91–111; and Banon, “Nostradamus.” On the occult and magic: Dr. Grasset, The Marvels Beyond Science (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1907), 268–69; Verter, “Dark Star Rising,” 206–26; and Albanese, Republic of Mind, 261.

16   Garrett, Respectable Folly, 228; Muray, Le XIX^e siècle à travers les âges, 224–49; and Edelman, “Spiritisme et politique.”

17   “Nostradamus’s mystical poetry”: interview of Marcel Janco in Henri Béhar and Catherine Dufour, eds., Dada circuit total (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2005), 167. See Guillaume Apollinaire to Louise de Coligny, January 19, 1915, in Apollinaire, Lettres à Lou, 125. On Dada’s recovery of Nostradamus: Stéphane Gerson, “Nostradamus’s Worlds,” Prophecies, xviii; and Browning, “Tristan Tzara.” More broadly, see Long, “Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction”; and Choucha, Surrealism and the Occult.

18   On magic: During, Modern Enchantments.

19   “American Nostradamus”: Kellar, A Magician’s Tour Up and Down and Round About the Earth, Being the Life and Adventures of the American Nostradamus. “Fantastic illusions”: advertisement in L’Orchestre: revue quotidienne des théâtres, July 27–August 3, 1891. “Mystifying”: Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1927. “Magic mirror”: The Complete Fortune-Teller, 1–2. See Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, July 16, 1865; and Jacques Malthête and Laurent Mannoni, L’œuvre de Georges Méliès (Paris: Editions de la Martinière, 2008), 73. On dream books: Weiss, Oneirocritica Americana, 10–16; and Britten, Art Magic, 421–23.

20   Proceedings of the board of Le Matin, December 24, 1906, AN 1 AR 10; and Caillot, “Le lancement du Capitan.”

21   Robert Orsi speaks of devotional promoters in Thank You, St. Jude. See also Moore, Selling God.

22   Milwaukee Sentinel, March 17, 1860; and Ogden Standard, April 26, 1909.

23   “Peep”: Deseret News, February 12, 1898, quoted in Pietruska, “Propheteering,” 298. On the lure of the future, see Pietruska as well as Perkins, The Reform of Time.

24   “Dark kingdom”: Dimanche illustré, December 29, 1935. See Weyman, The Man in Black, 29; San Francisco Call, March 19, 1899; Journal des débats, January 1, 1904; and “The Enchanted Book,” Washington Post, August 7, 1904.

25   “The more I probe”: Rouy l’aîné, Le magicien républicain, [3]. “No longer knows”: Octave Mirbeau, “Le Tripot aux champs,” in his Lettres de ma chaumière (Paris: A. Laurent, 1886), 11.

26   “End of everything”: Emile Zola, quoted in Weber, Apocalypses, 20. See Boia, La fin du monde, 164; and Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, June 5, 1897.

27   “End of the World”: Otago Witness, April 30, 1886. See Terrie Dopp Aamodt, Righteous Armies, Holy Cause: Apocalyptical Imagery in the Civil War (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002); Christopher McIntosh, The Swan King: Ludwig II of Bavaria (London: I. B. Taurus, 2003), 2, 193; Moore, Society Recollections in Paris and Vienna, 97; Leeds Mercury, April 24, 1886; and Le Petit Journal, June 25, 1886.

28   On this secularization of the apocalyptic, see Hall, Apocalypse, 7.

29   “Another authority”: British Colonist, November 14, 1882.

30   “Old Nostradamus”: Congreve, The Way of the World, 238. “Each Nostradamus”: Dryden, The Hind and the Panther, 102. “Little is generally known”: Holmes, “Nostradamus,” 25. See Horace Walpole to George Montagu, July 20, 1752, in Walpole, Private correspondence, 1:254; and “Nostradamus,” Household Words 12 (1855): 296.

31   “Magic!”: Le Matin, April 10, 1907, trans. Steven Crumb; see also the issues of April 5, 6, and 7. On stock images: Kalifa, Crime et Culture, 39; and Marion, “Narratologie médiatique,” 69–70.

32   Gabriel Nostradamus, Consult the Oracle; and Les Annales, October 27, 1912.

33   “Great popular storyteller”: Le Matin, April 8, 1907. “Luisant torné”: quatrain 8.5.

34   “That author of genius”: Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Fretchman (New York: Braziller, 1964), 132. See Littell’s Living Age, April 5, 1879; Daily Southern Cross, August 12, 1873; Parisot, Au 17 février 1874 Le Grand Avènement!!; Torné-Chavigny, Lo Que Sera; Hohlenberg, Michel de Nostredame; and Demars, “Michel Zévaco,” 147–49.

35   On mass media and emotions: Bodnar, “Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America,” 809; and Singer, “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism.” On the modern media culture: Kalifa, “L’envers fantasmé du quotidien,” in Kalifa et al., Civilisation du journal, 1329–54. On new experiences of time and space: Kern, Culture of Time and Space.

36   “Sorcerer abbot”: L’Evènement, January 26, 1877. “Crotchety”: Anon., “Nunquam Dormio,” Bell’s Life in London 3 (1885): 474. See also Louis Gimon, “Revue sommaire et chronologique des écrits les plus remarquables qui ont paru pour et contre Michel Nostradamus,” La Provence poétique, historique et littéraire 8 (1883): 5–6.

37   “Even in this present”: Every Saturday, May 23, 1874, 575. See Tristan, Le tour de France, 189–91; and Caston, Les marchands de miracles.

38   “Personal wants”: John Burroughs, “Science and Theology,” in The Writings of John Burroughs, 11: 19. On religion: L’Univers, April 4, 1874; Dupanloup, On Contemporary Prophecies, 4; Chabauty, Lettre sur les Prophéties modernes, 77; Chabauty, quoted in Torné-Chavigny, Nostradamus éclairci, 63; Mayeur, “Monseigneur Dupanloup et Louis Veuillot,” 199–201; and Multon, “Temps sont proches,” 2:285–423. On science: La France nouvelle, January 9, 1873, quoted in Torne-Chavigny, Nostradamus éclairci, 142; Advielle, Documents inédits, 57; and Winter, Mesmerized.

39   “Prophets of evil”: Camille Flammarion, Omega, 147. “Mysterious”: Anon., “Nunquam Dormio,” Bell’s Life in London 3 (May 13, 1885): 474. See “Centuries” and “Nostradamus,” in Pierre Larousse, ed., Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIX^e siècle, 17 vols. (Paris: Administration du grand Dictionnaire universel, 1866–90), 3:736, and 11, part 2: 1102–03; Dupanloup, On Contemporary Prophecies, 4, 19–24; Mauger, Nostradamus, ou le physicien plaideur; Lucien de la Hodde, The Cradle of Rebellions: A History of the Secret Societies of France (New York: J. Bradburn, 1864 [1850]), 338; and Théodar, Nostradamus démasqué.

40   “The best path”: François-René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’outre-tombe, 4 vols. (Paris: Flammarion, 1948 [1848]), 4:415. On fame: Braudy, Frenzy of Renown; and Lilti, “The Writing of Paranoia,” 55, 70. On these anxieties: Hahn, Scenes of Parisian Modernity, 90.

41   “Much too famous”: “Chavigny (Jean-Aimé de),” in Joseph-François Michaud, Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, 52 vols. (Paris: Michaud, 1811–28), 8:312. “Taken advantage”: Gimon, “Michel Nostradamus,” 4. See Lecanu, Histoire de Satan, 322; and Anon., Prophéties et documents prophétiques: Le danger de croire facilement aux Prophéties, 47.

42   Hitchcock, Frankenstein, 106; and Pietruska, “Propheteering,” 252–56.

43   Bois, “Comment je suis devenu sceptique,” 556; Multon, “Temps sont proches,” 3:612; and Elisée du Vignois, “Notre histoire et Nostradamus,” L’Echo du merveilleux 13 (1909): 436, and 14 (1911): 420.

44   “Utterly eccentric”: Le Pelletier, Oracles de Michel de Nostredame, 1:47. “That long chapter”: “Nostradamus the Astrologer,” Every Saturday (May 23, 1874): 575. See Larousse, Grand dictionnaire, 3:736; and John Delaware Lewis, Our College. Leaves from an Undergraduate’s Scribbling Book (London: G. Earle, 1857), 404–05.

45   This discussion has benefited from conversations with Aude Fauvel and Dominique Martin. Torné-Chavigny appears in Brunet, Les Fous littéraires, and Tcherpakov, Les fous littéraires. See Benazra, Répertoire chronologique, 406–07; and Blavier, Les fous littéraires.

46   “Carries a dignity”: quoted in Ferrell, The Bible and the People, 207. See L’Echo du merveilleux 9 (1905): 96, 11 (1907): 196–97, 455, 13 (1909): 373, and 14 (1910): 64–65; Normand, L’abbé Rigaux, 9; Jean-Pierre Laurant, L’ésotérisme chrétien au XIX^e siècle (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1992), 123, 199; and Willa Silverman, “Anti-Semitism and Occultism in Fin-de-Siècle France,” in Barbara Cooper and Mary Donaldson-Evans, eds., Modernity and Revolution in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), 159.

47   New York Times, February 23, 1878; Emile Berr, “Nostradamus,” 520–28; and Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1943.

CHAPTER 11: NOSTRADAMUS IS ADOLF HITLER

  1   Jeffrey Meyers, Modigliani: A Life (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006), 132–34; and Le Naour, Nostradamus s’en va-t-en guerre, 1914–1918.

  2   “Makes for fascinating”: Ward, Oracles of Nostradamus, front jacket flap.

  3   Lectures pour tous, December 1932, quoted in Panchasi, Future Tense, 39; Claude Fischler, “L’astrologie de masse,” and Philippe Defrance, “Astrologie d’élite, astrologie bourgeoise,” in Morin, ed., Croyance astrologique moderne, 44–45, 65–67.

  4   “All we hear”: Kepler, “1937, sous le signe des astres,” Sud-Magazine 10 (January 1937): 28. “Great Jewish”: Céline, Bagatelles pour un Massacre, 276. See La Semaine à Paris, December 8, 1933, 45; and Le Petit Régional, October 28, 1933.

  5   Seabrook, Witchcraft, 366; Paris-Midi, October 24, 1939; autobiographical sketch by Marcel Mousset, in Jean-François Costes, Hommes et femmes des impôts: récits autobiographiques, 1920–1990, 2 vols. (Paris: Documentation française, 2004), 1:419; New York Times, January 4, 1942; and Liebling, “The Road Back from Paris,” in World War II Writings, 38.

  6   Mericourt, Gesta Dei per Francos, 66; Edouard, Texte original et complet des Prophéties de Michel Nostradamus, 189; Diesbach de Belleroche, Une éducation manquée, 82; and Le Figaro, August 18, 1939.

  7   Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1936–1945: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000), 297. On the exodus and its psychological effects: Diamond, Fleeing Hitler.

  8   “France no longer”: Green, Fin d’un monde, 11–12. On trauma: Hoffman, “The Trauma of 1940,” 354–70; Henry Rousso, Le syndrome de Vichy de 1944 à nos jours, 2nd ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 18; Crocq, Les traumatismes psychiques de guerre, 164; and Garland, “Thinking About Trauma,” in Garland, ed., Understanding Trauma, 9–11.

  9   “A kind of popular”: Green, Fin d’un monde, 18. “Our disaster”: Mus, Le destin de l’Union française, 202. “A spirit of mysticism”: Kaplan, Scroll of Agony, 167. See Le Petit Régional, September 21, 1940; Mexico City College Collegian, September 3 and October 29, 1947, http://bit.ly/jSUS1B; and Elise Freinet to Célestin Freinet, July 15, 1940, Freinet, Correspondance, 174.

10   “Their shadowy, stupefying refuge”: Aragon, “Ombres,” in his Le crève-coeur, 61. “Nothing”: Léon Werth, 33 jours (Paris: V. Hamy, 1992), 43. See André Breton, interview by Charles-Henri Ford, August 1941, in Entretiens, 225–26; and Le Petit Régional, September 21, 1940.

11   “We put”: Vallotton, C’était au jour le jour, 89. See Seurat, 1918–1948, 129; and Poughkeepsie New Yorker, November 10, 1941.

12   “End of their misery”: Le Petit Provençal, September 24, 1943. See Némirovsky, Suite française, 402–03; and Elisabeth Gille, Le mirador: mémoires rêvés (Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1992), 259.

13   “We firmly”: Dutry-Soinne, Les méconnus de Londres, 2:174. “Bald eagle”: Life (March 29, 1943): 102.

14   “The West”: Privat, 1940, année de grandeur française, 20, 28. On Privat and the ministry: Jacques Halbronn, La vie astrologique: années 30–50, de Maurice Privat à Dom Néroman (Paris: La Grande Conjonction, 1995); and Drévillon and Lagrange, Nostradamus, l’éternel retour, 84–85.

15   “Undesirables”: Blocher-Saillens, Témoin des années noires, 149. See Ruir, Le grand carnage; Fontbrune, Les Prophéties de Maistre Michel Nostradamus, 26; Howe, Urania’s Children, 186; Charles Nismes to the Couesland printers, November 13, 1940, in Fontbrune, Ce que Nostradamus a vraiment dit, 26; and “Liste Otto. Index par auteurs” [1941–43?], 26, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, reference room X.

16   “Prophet with a raging head”: Loog, Die Weissagungen des Nostradamus, 68. On Loog and Hitler: Howe, Urania’s Children, 162; and Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, xvi, 217–18.

17   “In the National Socialist State”: Heinrich Himmler, quoted in Bobrick, The Fated Sky, 285. This discussion also rests on Time, September 25, 1939; Magida, The Nazi Séance, 166–67; Harvey, Beyond Enlightenment, 156–57; Howe, Urania’s Children, 102–18, 193–98; and Schellenberg, The Labyrinth, 189.

18   Goebbels is quoted in Boelcke, The Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels, 6. For the first version: Howe, Urania’s Children, 124, 159–66. For the second version: Boelcke, Kriegspropaganda, 223–24, translation by François Biver available at the BML; and van Berkel, “Nostradamus, Astrology, and the Bible. Substudy World War II,”http://bit.ly/kivPGc. See also Clayton D. Laurie, The Propaganda Warriors: America’s Crusade Against Nazi Germany (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 9.

19   Boelcke, Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels, 6, 42–45, 65–66; Boelcke, Kriegspropaganda, 242, 366, 383; Goebbels, Diaries, 1939–1941, 60, 89, 95; Howe, Urania’s Children, 185; and de Launay, La France de Pétain, 12.

20   “Must once again”: Goebbels, Diaries, 1942–1943, 220. See Boelcke, Secret Conferences of Dr. Goebbels, 69–70, 89; and Les Prophéties de Nostradamus (Paris, 1941). On Krafft, see his Comment Nostradamus a-t-il entrevu l’avenir de l’Europe?; and Howe, Urania’s Children, 182–91, 220.

21   “The Americans”: Goebbels, Diaries, 1942–1943, 220. See Doob, “Goebbels’ Principles of Propaganda,” 200, 210–12.

22   “I realized”: Louis de Wohl, “Hitler and the Stars,” Palestine Post, October 28, 1945. “Great gifts”: W.T. Caufeild, memorandum (October 6, 1942), National Archives (U.K.), KV 2/2821. See Angus Calder, The People’s War, 481; Howe, Urania’s Children, 205–18; T.W.M. van Berkel, “Nostradamus Prophezeit der Kriegsverlauf,”http://bit.ly/11LmhW; and Emma Garman, “The Inconvenient Astrologer of M15,” The Awl, http://bit.ly/HCeBYi. This account also rests on de Wohl’s security service personal file in the National Archives, KV 2/2821.

23   I am quoting the translation of quatrain 9.90 in the Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1941. On divination: New York Times, December 22, 1940; Weiss, Oneirocritica Americana, 3; and Richard Gerald Culleton, The Prophets and Our Times (Taft, CA: self-published, 1943), 140. On Nostradamus’s appeal: Washington Post, June 5, 1942; and Seabrook, Witchcraft, 366.

24   “Background on the news”: Binghampton Press, August 27, 1941. “We could all be Nostradamus”: Niagara Falls Gazette, July 16, 1941. “Replaced Mein Kampf”: Washington Post, April 9, 1941. See Neavill,“Publishing in Wartime,” 590.

25   “U.S. cinema star”: Time, May 5, 1941. See Jacques Portes, “Les Etats-Unis, terre de naissance d’une culture de masse moderne,” in Mollier et al., Culture de masse et culture médiatique, 91.

26   “The great psychic”: Norse, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel, 50. See Nostradamus, June 8, 1911, Gaumont script held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Arts du Spectacle. Norse made this remark while recalling his feverish readings of quatrains in the late 1930s. It is not clear that Gaumont ever produced this script.

27   “Educate the public”: Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 14, 1937. On documentaries and shorts: Jack C. Ellis and Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Continuum, 2005); Schatz, Boom and Bust, 47–49; and Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Crown, 1999), 210–11. On Wilson and the shorts: Carey Wilson oral history (1959), Columbia University Oral History Collection; Poughkeepsie Eagle-News, February 3, 1927; Niagara Falls Gazette, August 30, 1927; New York Times, June 1, 1941; Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur, 43–52; and Vieira, Irving Thalberg, 41, 70.

28   “Riddling”: Motion Picture Herald 133 (October 22, 1938): 48. See script of What Do You Think? (Nostradamus), July 7, 1938, 3, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, MGM Shorts Dept. scripts, box 4.

29   “New and even more”: script of More About Nostradamus, September 4, 1940, 5, Margaret Herrick Library, MGM Shorts Dept. scripts, box 4. “Stellar road map”: Nona Howard, Follow Your Lucky Stars: A Handbook for Student Astrologers (Cleveland: World, 1943), 13. See Carey Wilson oral history, 203; Richard Goldstone oral history (1991–92), Margaret Herrick Library, 235–39; and Time, September 25, 1939. On Manly Hall: Horowitz, Occult America, 147–58; Sahagun, Master of the Mysteries; Manly Hall, “The Inward Look and the Outward” and “Nostradamus,” Horizon 2 (1942): 1–2, 14–15; and Hall, “Nostradamus Translations” (February 20, 1943), University of Southern California, MGM Collection, box 582.

30   “Now, we’re digging”: Niagara Falls Gazette, February 19, 1943. See Hall, quoted in Sahagun, Master of the Mysteries, 83; and MGM’s Short Story (July–September 1938): 15.

31   “Read the fateful”: Ward, Oracles of Nostradamus, front cover; See E. P. Summerson, Jr., letter to the editor, Life (April 21, 1941): 8; and Anderson, Seven Years That Changed the World, 45–47.

32   “A certain doctrinaire”: Goldstone oral history, 342. See Schatz, Boom and Bust, 139–41; May, The Big Tomorrow, 143; and Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 63, 141.

33   “The United States will be”: script for More About Nostradamus, 16. See Hall, “Nostradamus Translations.”

34   “Make a given verse”: Goldstone oral history, 242; see also 21–42, 342–47. See Wilson oral history, 203. On American wartime propaganda and Hollywood: Fox, “Propaganda and the Flight of Rudolf Hess,” 89; Eyman, Lion of Hollywood, 277; and Hay, MGM, 192–93.

35   “Psychology”: The Lion’s Roar 10 (1942). “You have to seek out”: Sidney Carroll, “Nostradamus Up to Date,” Coronet 13 (December 1942): 172. See J. A. Hammerton, Other Things Than War (London: MacDonald, 1943), 114; MGM’s Short Story (July–September 1938): 15; and Goldstone oral history, 237–38.

36   “New generations,” Time, May 5, 1941. See Hodgson, Winning My Wings, 219.

37   “Divert the great streams”: Schellenberg, Labyrinth, 105. “Energetic movie scholar”: Niagara Falls Gazette, February 19, 1943. “A whole army”: Sidney Carroll, “Nostradamus Up to Date,” Coronet 13 (December 1942): 172. See Films for Classroom Use: Handbook of Information on Films Selected and Classified by the Advisory Committee on the Use of Motion Pictures in Education (New York: Teaching Films Custodians, 1941), 205–06; Tulsa Sunday World, May 3, 1942; and The Lion’s Roar 9 (1942): 58.

38   “Occultist propaganda”: Goebbels, Diaries, 1942–1943, 220. “Who Is Nostradamus?”: quotation in Wulff, Zodiac and Swastika, 96. “Ally on the propaganda front”: New York Times, January 4, 1942. “Mein Kampf”: Poughkeepsie New Yorker, November 10, 1941. See Breton, interview by Charles-Henri Ford, August 1941, in Breton,Entretiens, 225–26.

39   “Silly rubbish”: Goebbels, November 22, 1939, quoted in Boelcke, Secret Conferences, 6. “This superstitious philosophy”: Goldstone oral history, 237. On American perceptions of propaganda: Ralph D. Casey, What Is Propaganda? War Department Education Manual (1944); Mark Crispin Miller, introduction to Edward Bernays,Propaganda (Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2005 [1928]), 9–14; and Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 66–67.

40   “It was an anti-English”: Vercors, La bataille du silence: souvenirs de minuit (Paris: Presses de la cité, 1992), 325. See Wulff, Zodiac and Swastika, 95–96; Simonin, Les Editions de Minuit, 192–93; and Jean Sasson, Mayada, Daughter of Iraq: One Woman’s Survival Under Saddam Hussein (New York: Penguin, 2003), 53.

41   “Possibly”: R. De Witt Miller, Forgotten Mysteries (Chicago: Cloud, 1947), 164. “Enough”: Atlanta Constitution, August 18, 1945. “Amidst the jubilation”: Herald-Mail (Fairport, NY), May 17, 1945.

CHAPTER 12: APOCALYPSE NOW?

  1   “Nostradamus superstar”: Le Provençal, August 19, 1981. “This fall”: Bonne soirée, September 25–October 1, 1981.

  2   Fontbrune’s real name was Pigeard. This account draws from Fontbrune, Nostradamus: Countdown to Apocalypse; Le Régional, September 17, 1981; Roger Sandell, “Apocalypse When?,” Magonia, January 18, 1985; Le Provençal, April 14, 1989; Bessard-Banquy, La vie du livre contemporain, 135–36; and Dumézil, The Riddle of Nostradamus.

  3   “The Shape of Tomorrow,” The Economist, January 23, 1982; Chicago Tribune, August 23, 1981; and Conrad, Orson Welles, 101–02.

  4   “It is difficult”: Henri Peyre, History in Modern Culture (New York: French Historical Society, 1950), 18. On this cold war climate: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Vital Center (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949); Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light; and Graebner, The Age of Doubt.

  5   “A war”: Beye, 120 Charles Street, 224. “Like to know”: Gary Lee Horton, “Nostradamus—Historian of the Future,” Fantastic Adventures, July 1947.

  6   “With terrifying”: Roberts, The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus, 292. “Short”: John Kobler, “Yrs. Truly, A. Lincoln,” New Yorker, February 25, 1956, http://nyr.kr/lJQSLg. See New York Times, January 25, 1966.

  7   Chicago Tribune, February 21, 1963. This is the original version of quatrain 1.26:

Le grand du fouldre tumbe d’heure diurne,

Mal est predict par porteur postulaire:

Suivant presaige tumbe d’heure nocturne,

Conflit Reims, Londres, Etrusque pestifere.

  8   Susan Emmanuel, The Day After, Museum of Broadcast Communications, http://bit.ly/2SmjCL; and Samuel, Future, 12–14.

  9   “The press is just full”: Tony Benn, quoted in Francis Wheen, Strange Days Indeed, 309. On these changes: Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 223, 359–61; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), chap. 14; and Gardner, The Science of Fear, 300.

10   Time, June 19, 1972; and Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 49, 88. The transformation of the religious landscape is discussed in Roof et al., The Post-War Generation and Establishment Religion; Bréchon, “L’évolution du religieux”; and Hervieu-Léger, Le pèlerin et le converti. For a recent statistical analysis of the United States, see Charles M. Blow, “Paranormal Flexibility,” New York Times, December 12, 2009.

11   On the supernatural and modern media: Claude Fischler, preface to Morin, ed., Croyance astrologique moderne, 12–13; and Augé, Non-Places, xi. See also Ici-Paris, May 4–10, 1948.

12   On Nostradamus’s global presence: George Packer, The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 171; Time, December 26, 1994; and Xiaoying Zhang, “Nostradamus’s Effect in China,” research paper, New York University, May 2010.

13   “A kind of Ayatollah”: Bonne soirée, September 25–October 1, 1981. “The star”: Sunday Times, July 4, 1999. “From Heaven”: Garencières, The True Prophecies, 433. See the note in Prophecies, 372.

14   “Day of judgment”: “Nostradamus,” Littell’s Living Age, April 5, 1879. “Cataclysm”: Manti Messenger, October 11, 1940. “Nostradamus prophesied”: Aldous Huxley, quoted in Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 608. See Torné-Chavigny, Concordance des prophéties de Nostradamus, 156.

15   “The confrontation”: Paris-Match, June 8, 1995. “All Japanese”: Hidetoshi Tahahashi, interview in Murakami, Underground, 349. See Fontbrune, Nostradamus: Countdown to Apocalypse, 315; and Kingston, Japan’s Quiet Transformation, chap. 1.

16   “More to this enduring figure”: Daily Mail, May 14, 1999. See Paulus, Nostradamus 1999; Guardian, July 1, 1999; Le Régional, April 8–14, 1999; and Telegraph, December 10, 2010.

17   “If we don’t wake up”: José Argüelles, “The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology,” in Braden, The Mystery of 2012, 77. See Chris Mooney, “Surprising Nostradamus,” American Prospect, February 12, 2001, http://bit.ly/sAw7AD.

18   “Modernity”: Hall, Apocalypse, 206. On the turn of the millennium: Newsweek, October 24, 1999; Airiau, L’Eglise et l’Apocalypse, 77, 125; Weber, Apocalypses, 199–211; Guyatt, Have a Nice Doomsday, 6–7; and Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy.

19   “Sadistic”: Fontbrune, L’étrange XX^e siècle vu par Nostradamus, 155. “Acute”: Le Régional, February 5, 1981. “Final Shit Rain”: Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (New York: Simon & Schuster 2003), 332. See Ici-Paris, November 5–11, 1952; Ragusa, The Skin Between Us, 52; and Fontbrune, interviews in Le Matin de Paris, August 18, 1981, Paris-Match, August 21, 1981, and Le Régional, August 27, 1981.

20   For such views on the Bible, see Armstrong, The Bible, 226–29; and Gutjahr, An American Bible, 173.

21   “To cash in”: Roger W. Straus to Matthew Evans, April 14, 1982, Farrar, Straus and Giroux records, New York Public Library, Series VII, box 570. “Morbid”: Fontbrune, Nostradamus: Countdown to Apocalypse, 441. See Paris-Match, August 21, 1981.

22   “You will live” and subsequent posts: http://amzn.to/mmXho2. “The sense”: Tahahashi, interview in Murakami, Underground, 348. See New York Times, April 8, 1988; Wheen, Idiot Proof, 118; and Broadcasting & Cable, January 7, 2009.

23   “Rising spiral”: Sun, December 31, 2002. See Adorno, Stars Down to Earth; Hall et al., Policing the Crisis; and Glassner, The Culture of Fear, 201, 206. On media and short-term alarm: Cusset, Décennie, 227–28.

24   “Something”: Abramsky, “The New Fear,” B6. See Joel Aschenbach, “The Century of Disasters,” Slate, May 13, 2011, http://slate.me/kLhJFD. Within the growing literature on the culture of fear, I have learned most from Bourke, Fear; Beck, Risk Society; Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity; and Frank Füredi, “Toward a Sociology of Fear,” in Kate Hebblethwaite and Eliza McCarthy, eds., Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2007), 23–26. Web sites linking Nostradamus to cataclysms in 2012 include Nostradamus Predictions, http://bit.ly/tJBcZc, and nostradamus.org, http://bit.ly/sHRcCj.

25   On the 2003 heat wave and vulnerability: Michel Kokoreff and Jacques Rodriguez, “Une société de l’incertitude,” Sciences humaines 50 (2005), http://bit.ly/km8X8G.

26   Kaplan, and Marshal, The Cult at the End of the World; Reader, “Violent Millenarianism,” 239–40; Kogo, “Aum Shinrikyo and Spiritual Emergency,” 82–101; and Kisala, “Nostradamus and the Apocalypse in Japan.”

27   “Shocking Nostradamus Cover-Up,” Sun, October 18, 2004. See Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, 3–40; Abramsky, “New Fear,” B6; John Evan-Jones, The Nostradamus Conspiracy (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2001); Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy, 20; Taguieff, L’imaginaire du complot mondial; as well aswww.911truth.org/images/ZogbyPoll2007.pdf and www.fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/government/war/news.php?q=1300727277.

28   This view can be found in Füredi, Politics of Fear. On Aum: Murakami, Underground, 274–76, 318; and Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It, 50–51, 128–29. On astrology’s appeal among vulnerable people: Wuthnow, Experimentation in American Religion, chap. 2; and Boy and Michelat, “Croyances aux parasciences.” On our melancholy modernity: Charle, Discordance des temps.

29   On myths and fate, I am drawing from Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 79.

30   Nostradamus syndrome and “this is about”: Boia, Fin du monde, 233. See Time, September 7, 1981; Le Point, August 24–30, 1981; Le Figaro Magazine, June 12, 1999; The Scotsman, October 20, 2001; and Luis Prada, “The 6 Best 2012 Apocalypse Theories (Are All Bullshit),” cracked.com, http://bit.ly/bDAfgF.

31   See Hobbes, Leviathan, 76; Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 21, 238, 282–87; and Etienne Gilson, “Les terreurs de l’an 2000,” Ecclesia 14 (1950): 10.

32   “Shreds”: The Times, October 12, 2001. “In response”: Boia, Fin du monde, 233. See Esquerre, La manipulation mentale; Louise Samways, Dangerous Persuaders (New York: Penguin, 1994); and Fenech, Face aux sectes, ii, 5.

33   “When faith”: Guardian, July 2, 1999. “Nattering”: Daily Telegraph, October 17, 2001. See Guilhaume, Nostradamus, 237.

34   L’Evènement (June 10–16, 1999): 59; Washington Post, February 17, 1953; Fenech, Face aux sectes, 166–67; and Pagels, Revelations, 174.

35   Le Régional, November 24, 1983; Brooks, Letters to My Husband, 106; and John Tierney, “Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome,” New York Times, February 9, 2010.

36   On apocalypticism today: Michael Moyer, “Eternal Fascinations with the End,” Scientific American, September 2010, http://bit.ly/ckk9gs.

37   “A name”: Henry Miller, “A Few Chaotic Recollections,” From Your Capricorn Friend, 36. See Miller, aphorism in The Henry Miller Reader, 365.

38   “Strife”: Miller, “A Few Chaotic Recollections,” 38. See Vrebos, Henry Miller, 74.

39   “Smash-up”: Miller, Conversations with Henry Miller, 97. “Vast multitude”: Miller, foreword to Omarr, Henry Miller, 19–20. See Max Ernst, “Nostradamus, Blanche de Castille et le petit Saint-Louis,” Révolution surréaliste 12 (December 15, 1929): 49; and Miller to Fontbrune, April 28, 1951, November 13, 1951, and January 7, 1954, Fontbrune, Henry Miller et Nostradamus, 81, 92, 100. Thank you to Denis Hollier for directing me toward Ernst’s collage.

40   “Fundamentally”: 1969 interview of Henry Miller, quoted in Wallace Fowlie, “Henry Miller as Visionary,” in Gottesman, ed., Critical Essays on Henry Miller, 187. On Miller’s religiosity and Greenwich Village: Nesbit, Henry Miller and Religion, 29–30, 126.

41   Spangler, Emergence, 17–19; and Yun-Shik, Korea Confronts Globalization, 222. On the New Age and syncretic spirituality: Horowitz, Occult America, 257. On the transformation of religion: Roof et al., The Post-War Generation; and James A. Beckford, “Social Movements as Free-Floating Religious Phenomena,” in Fenn, ed., Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion, 232–35.

42   Scholars have shown that, in France at least, belief in astrology or fortune-tellers has served as a complement to mainstream religion rather than a substitution. But it also feeds off dissatisfaction with traditional religious institutions. See, for instance, Bréchon, “Les attitudes religieuses en France,” 24. On the transformations of spirituality: Robert Wuthnow, “Spirituality and Spiritual Practice,” in Fenn, ed., Blackwell Companion to Sociology of Religion, 306–12.

43   “Scaremongering”: The Times, October 12, 2001. Jonathan Kay places much of the blame for recent conspiracy theories on the Internet in his Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conspiracist Underground (New York: Harper, 2011). On the Internet: Roger Chartier, “L’écrit et l’écran, une révolution en marche,” Le Monde, October 13, 2007.

44   Rodgers, Age of Fracture.

45   “Symbol”: Lévi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, 64. This discussion benefited from a conversation with Jacques Revel.

46   “Don’t even see”: Adorno, Stars Down to Earth, 57. On the current enthusiasm for geniuses: Garber, “Our Genius Problem,” 65–72.

47   This portrait of late modernity is in conversation with Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 27; Augé, Non-Places, xxii; and Lenoir, Les métamorphoses de Dieu, 223.

48   “Uncertain”: Miller, quoted in Vrebos, Henry Miller, 35–36.

EPILOGUE: TIMES FOR NOSTRADAMUS

  1   I interviewed François Wyss-Mercier in person on November 25, 2003, and by phone on January 21, 2004. See Le Régional, September 29, 1983.

  2   “Nothing interesting”: Joseph François Megy, “Notice sur Michel Nostradamus,” February 7, 1818, Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, 6 M 1610. See Garcin, Dictionnaire historique et topographique de la Provence, 1:84–85; Frédéric Mistral, “Avans-prepaus,” La Bresco d’Antoni-Blasi Crouisillat, iii; Le tout-Salon: Revue annuelle (Marseille, 1897): 41; and Audier, Salon: capitale des huiles.

  3   “Engineers”: Le Régional, January 13, 1950. See the mayor’s speech at the inauguration of the Craponne monument, October 22, 1854, AMS DD 126, fol. 216–18.

  4   Francou, Salon et son devenir; Salon de Provence. Etudes des perspectives de développement de la ville. Rapport no. 1: perspectives démographiques et économiques (Paris: Omnium technique d’études urbaines, 1965); Jacques Van Migom, “Plan d’urbanisme directeur des quartiers de L’Empéri et de Craponne,” February 26, 1964, Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, O 12 2320; and D’Agostino, “Les extensions récentes de Salon-de-Provence.”

  5   “What’s the reason”: Miller to Braissaï, November 25, 1964, in Brassaï, Henry Miller, Happy Rock, 7. “Salon the tourist center”: Frédéric Alquier, “Programme en faveur du tourisme salonais,” Le Régional, February 26, 1954. “Century of speed”: Le Régional, June 13–19, 1960. See Salon de Provence. Guide officiel de tourisme 1956(Béziers: Sodier, [1956]); and Young, “La Vieille France as Object of Bourgeois Desire.”

  6   “Kasbah”: collective letter by twenty-one small business owners to Francou, June 14, 1974, AMS 3 T 7. “Impose their rule”: Le Régional, September 27, 1984. “Is no longer”: Le Régional, February 28, 1980.

  7   “Reconquest”: Le Régional, March 9, 1989. See Le Régional, August 14, 1980, and March 21, 1985. On postwar urban planning, heritage, and tourism: Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture; Castells, The Informational City; and Wakeman, Modernizing the Provincial City.

  8   “Everything has been”: press kit for the inauguration of the Maison Nostradamus, February 22, 1992, AMS 231 W 53. Among other sources, I relied on Le Régional, April 8, 1982; Salon mensuel 10 (1991): 12; and my interview with Jacqueline Allemand in Salon, March 30, 2004.

  9   On these summer festivals: Crivello, “Du passé, faisons un spectacle!”

10   “Mecca”: clipping of Jacques Bouisset, “Sur les pas de Nostradamus,” Paris-Match Provence, [1979?], AMS 7 M 6/2. “Super-genius”: Le Régional, May 9, 1985. “Cultural versatility”: press kit for the Journés Nostradamus [April–May 1985], AMS 7M 6/2.

11   “Nostradamian year”: program for Les Nostradamiques de Salon-de-Provence, 1999, [1]. “We were in the city”: Colette (pseud.), interview by the author, Salon, January 13, 2004. Christian Kert, interview by the author, Paris, March 31, 2004. See Françoise Wyss-Mercier, memorandum to Francou, May 1985, AMS 7 M 6/2; and the interview of Christian Kert in Salon Centre: bulletin du comité d’intérêts du quartier centre ville 9 (September 1987): 2.

12   “Dreams”: dossier presenting the 1991 historical pageant of Salon, AMS 166 W 14/4. I am also drawing from my telephone interview with Jo Stofati, January 19, 2004.

13   For seminal statements about all of this, see Pierre Nora, “The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory,” Transit 22 (2002): 1–6, repr. in Eurozine, April 19, 2002, http://bit.ly/jhIhyl; and Hartog, Régimes d’historicité, 125–26.

14   “Nostradamus jostles”: Reconstitution historique. Salon de Provence. 10e édition 1995, 8. See Le Régional, March 21, 1985; and Jean-Louis Kamoun, “Le chant des étoiles,” 1999, private collection of Françoise Wyss-Mercier.

15   “Times of Nostradamus”: Le Provençal, March 29, 1989. “People were saying”: Georges (pseud.), interview by the author, Salon, November 25, 2003.

16   “Flesh him out”: Christian Kert interview. See Le Régional, April 8–14, 1999; and Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude, 16–19.

17   “The business of fear”: press kit for the 1999 Nostradamiques, AMS 312 W 4. “Less than scrupulous”: Jacqueline Allemand, quoted in Le Provençal, June 13, 1996. See Le Provençal, July 8, 1991.

18   “As linked”: Gimon, “Michel Nostradamus”: 4.

19   “We don’t get”: The Times, June 26, 1999.

20   On stigmatized knowledge, see Barkun, Culture of Conspiracy.

21   Benedict Carey, “Do You Believe in Magic?,” New York Times, January 23, 2007.

22   “Only part of us”: Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (New York: Penguin, 2007 [1941]), 1102.