Chapter 2

The Power of Words

Plenty of people questioned Nostredame’s literary talents in his lifetime, but no one could dispute the hold of his words on the collective imagination. “I believe well that we do not have anyone like you in all of Europe,” wrote Hans Rosenberger in 1561. No astrologer combined with such dexterity “the admirable virtues necessary for the knowledge of the occult sciences as well as the mathematical ones.” And no writer expressed this with greater vigor. One need only dip into his torrent of words—a crashing river rather than a flowing brook—to feel its formidable pull. Words cascade from line to line in an irresistible surge. “The coin of the realm shall be much descried,” intones one line. “Peace, novelties, holy laws in decline.” The current one feels is the energy of a voice that could measure and shape its world while submitting to its unyielding force. This was Nostredame’s talent as a writer: the ability to see and sense everything and then distill it all in words that seared minds across the continent.¹

Today, fortune-tellers flourish in the West, but most of us obtain our global predictions and prophecies secondhand, through magazines, Web sites, and tabloids. I got mine in Paris-Match in the 1980s. During the Renaissance, however, people went straight to the source. More often than not, this meant almanacs and prognostications—the fastest-growing medium in Europe. Nostredame began writing such annual publications in 1550 and continued doing so until his death sixteen years later. Bundling jagged words and world-images in far-reaching literary missives, he rose to the top of a highly competitive market, filled with doctors, surgeons, and astronomers.

Short and flimsy as they were, almanacs helped readers manage their lives. They always included a calendar, which made it possible to master present and future, and ephemerides. Readers considered the phases of the moon before timing key decisions, such as bleedings or commercial ventures. Almanac authors and publishers might then add a fair schedule (essential for traders) or weather forecasts (which alerted landowners and others to the risks of famine). Nostredame wrote at least one almanac each year and also penned prognostications about the year to come. Both genres tapped astrology, but almanacs resembled tables whereas prognostications took the form of prose narratives about weather patterns, epidemics, wars, and even the behavior of men with soft or bellicose temperaments. His prognostications began with the year’s “general disposition” (for instance, unrest in Italy and pestilence across Europe) and then provided detailed forecasts for each season as well as each month.²

Nostredame gave readers what they expected. Here were predictions about set months alongside “perpetual” ones that encompassed hundreds of years. Here were comets and earthquakes and other omens announcing wondrous events. And here were conjunctions and calculations that showed, say, that Saturn’s revolutions would cause an upheaval at the end of the eighteenth century. References to such revolutions could be found in other publications besides Nostredame’s. Commentators have long sought to identify the sources from which he drew inspiration. They have drawn connections to classical authors such as Suetonius and historians such as Philippe de Commynes, to the fourth-century Book of Prodigies of Julius Obsequens, and to Richard Roussat’s 1550Book on the State and Mutation of Time. Nostredame probably consulted the Mirabilis Liber, a compendium of prophecies, mostly in Latin, that was first published in Paris in 1522 to buttress the supremacy of King François I over the Hapsburg Charles V. No doubt Nostredame also read almanacs. He neither came out of the blue nor broke with his intellectual world. Contemporaries knew where to place him.³

Nostredame, in turn, knew where to place his almanacs. He had the good fortune and also the good judgment to enter an editorial universe that was full of promise. Demand for printed matter, whether theological or secular, Latin or vernacular, was on the rise. This market was unregulated and unforgiving, however. Powerful dynasties of printers and publishers oversaw large workshops and sometimes controlled the entire process, from the purchase of paper to manuscript selection and the correction of proofs. Given the costs of print, storage, and distribution, they were always looking for new products. The most successful publishers understood what the market wanted and recognized a promising opportunity—such as the almanac—when they saw one. Demand was high, and publishers could streamline the process by reusing the same material and the same woodcuts in different editions. Some publishers specialized in the genre; others offered it alongside other products. All made sure that the peddlers who sold books and pamphlets in Renaissance cities were amply stocked.⁴

Nostredame developed close relationships with several publishers, but this required that he leave Salon. On several occasions throughout the 1550s, he closed his books, put his papers in order, bade his family good-bye, and started a 150-mile journey due north, toward the proud, bustling city of Lyon. Having spent time in Lyon in his youth and later as a plague doctor, Nostredame knew the city well. He had seen it build on its prime location near the Swiss and Italian borders to become one of the main commercial centers in Europe. Lyon may have lacked Paris’s political power and universities, but it boasted rich banks, tax-exempt commercial fairs, and an enterprising merchant class. Credit was cheap. Spices and silk abounded. Trade routes flowed to the Low Countries, Italy, and the Mediterranean. Riding past the city’s ramparts, down narrow streets and hidden passageways, Nostredame found himself in a cosmopolitan maelstrom, teeming with German traders, Flemish textile merchants, Florentine bankers, and hordes of artisans. Nostredame recognized familiar abbeys and orchards but also uncovered river quays, hospitals, and plazas that had not been there a few years earlier.⁵

Nostredame eventually crossed a bridge and entered the city’s commercial heart, a narrow peninsula that lies between the Rhône and Saône rivers. His destination was the rue Mercière. Each trade had its neighborhood in Lyon, and this street, the most vibrant in town, belonged to printers and publishers. Lyon was now one of the leading publishing centers in Europe. Professionals from Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries had settled there in the early 1500s, bringing with them expertise and ambition. By the middle of the century, thousands of printers, type makers, binders, ink suppliers, writers, translators, engravers, illustrators, copy editors, and booksellers toiled side by side. There were two hundred workshops, half of them in the narrow houses that lined the rue Mercière. The thumping of presses and the din of conversations filled the air at all hours. The town’s publishers invented new formats and diversified their offerings, from aphorisms and emblem books to illustrated works, all of which were shipped to Antwerp, Venice, and countless other cities.⁶

By the time he arrived in Lyon, Nostredame would have completed his publications for the next year. He began work a year ahead, writing in the winter and spring, securing the requisite privileges in the early fall, and then handing in his manuscript in time for publication in October. It was imperative to launch them during Lyon’s November fair and then make the most of the busy winter season. Nostredame seems to have handled this well. His correspondence contains no complaints about tardy or lackluster manuscripts. In Lyon, he made the rounds of publishers. He might start his day in the company of Benoît Rigaud, the peasant’s son who had made a fortune by cornering the regional market for almanacs and broadsides (the ancestors of modern-day posters). In the afternoon, he might drop in on the prolific Macé Bonhomme, who published some of his books as well as almanacs. On another day, he might take a stroll with Antoine Volant, the onetime domino maker who once made a special journey to Salon to see him. And he certainly spent considerable time with Jean Brotot, the trusted bookseller who held his mail when he was away. Nostredame dealt with all of them because authors did not have exclusive contracts at this time. Instead, publishers secured the permission (privilège) to publish a given work for a year in a particular city or region. Several publishers could thus release different editions of the same work at the same time.

Publishers commonly inserted new material in manuscripts after accepting them; it might be a list of saints, a series of epigrams, or agricultural precepts. This was standard practice, and Nostredame complied, but he could also assert himself. He cut off publishers whom he deemed too self-interested and overruled timid ones. Some years, he wrote two or three almanacs and prognostications for the year ahead. Brotot doubted that the market could absorb so much Nostradamus: “Such is the fashion, dear Michel—brevity is appreciated.” Brotot went on, “How do you suppose that the average reader will accept two separate prognostications without raising his eyebrows, especially coming from one and the same source?” Nostredame ignored the advice and forged ahead, with utter confidence in his own judgment.⁷

He may have felt that a single almanac was unlikely to yield significant dividends. Authors lost out (as did some publishers) in a system that allowed a book to rapidly fall into the public domain. Plagiarism, pirated editions, and illegal copying of almanacs were rife. Lyon’s Jean Huguetan once had an associate travel sixty miles to Valence in order to purchase a copy of the latest Nostradamus almanac, which he would then publish himself. Authors could not count on reliable payments from their publishers, and the payments they did receive were generally modest. In England, almanac authors made around forty shillings per year (less than a thousand dollars today). Wealthy patrons hence played a key role in this economy. Authors inserted dithyrambic dedications in exchange for financial support or protection against criticism and official reprimands. Nostredame secured many such patrons. A full list would tax the reader’s patience, but it included Catherine de Médicis, kings of France, several lords, and high-placed magistrates. He was especially solicitous of local dignitaries whose backing he might need, such as the governor of Provence.

Sales of Nostredame’s almanacs did not enable him to quit writing horoscopes, but they brought him income and broad exposure. Other publishers spotted a successful product and began releasing almanacs under his name in Lyon and Paris. Foreigners soon came calling. Germans were the quickest, translating and publishing half a dozen of his works by century’s end. Italians from Milan, Padua, and Rimini followed suit in 1556. They published twice as many, perhaps because Nostredame’s travels had taken him to northern Italy. The English came next, with a Prognostication of Maister Michel Nostradamus in 1558. Several other translations followed in short succession. At least twenty English bookshops sold his almanacs by 1562. A few years later, publishers from Kampen and Antwerp translated a couple of his almanacs into Dutch. This international presence was not exceptional, for Renaissance publishers knew what was happening in other countries. But these translations—whether authorized or not—were commissioned early, repeatedly, and over a wide expanse.⁸

French and foreign publishers thus helped mold the “Nostradamus” that was available for public consumption. Nostredame was not the sole protagonist in this story, but he did create a potent mixture of tradition and innovation, tapping divination and old forms of patronage while embracing modern technologies and aspirations. In the mid-1550s, a local engineer named Adam de Craponne came to him with an ambitious plan. He had designed a canal that would irrigate Salon and the barren Crau plateau with water from the Durance River, making it possible to cultivate olive trees and build flour mills. All he needed was funding to launch the venture. Nostredame loaned Craponne money on three occasions. The canal was inaugurated in 1559 and, as one agronomist put it in 1600, it “changed the appearance of the lands it irrigated.” Nostredame had apparently grasped the potential of this technological innovation.⁹

Print likewise altered Renaissance Europe. It spread knowledge, fostered new ways of contemplating the world, and altered the ways people organized knowledge about this world. If Nostredame outperformed other almanac authors, it is in part because he managed his editorial ventures with dexterity. Despite starting late in life, he understood and accepted the rules of the market. Whether tapping several genres or cultivating professional relationships in Lyon, he displayed the same mix of audacity, obstinacy, and caution as in his astrological practice. Self-promotion did not faze him, either. “I would like you to be aware of my almanac for next year,” he wrote Rosenberger in the fall of 1561. “I discuss in French, and according to my method, the numerous wonders as well as the no less numerous calamities that threaten our unfortunate Europe.” The result was a massive output of vernacular publications that were easily reproducible and readily available, dependent on the author’s authority and yet open to readers. Nostredame and his publications exemplified the media culture that was taking form in Western Europe.¹⁰

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But editorial prowess is only part of this story. The man’s prose and verse also captured the enigmatic power of words. During the Middle Ages, theologians and philosophers had endowed nouns, formulas, and incantations with therapeutic or magical powers. Words embodied hidden truths and divine ideas and the essence of things and people. Whether one understood them or not, they contained layers of meaning and might even modify the natural world. Determining where these powers came from proved more complicated. What some attributed to God or the devil, others linked to a natural origin, such as stars or modulated sounds. These debates continued in Nostredame’s time, and so did enthusiasm for words that transcended the symbolic realm to become analogies of the cosmos. Some Christian humanists even agreed with the Jewish kabbalah that words could transmit divine revelation through not only what they said but also the order and numerical values of their letters.¹¹

Renaissance poets, too, were enthused about the ability of words to overcome audiences. Cultivated people learned poetry in school because its rhymes and cadences facilitated memorization. Many then developed a lifelong taste. Kings, churchmen, doctors, lawyers, and others read and often composed poems. Humanists codified a genre that could convey common sense or indignation, a genre that could name the underlying essence of things, present and sometimes future. The Neoplatonists believed that poets could contemplate and render meaningful mysteries that befuddled ordinary mortals. A divine inspiration, or furor, elevated their soul beyond human understanding, toward ecstasy and apprehension of the universe’s governing forces. This mattered more than adherence to poetic rules, said Nostredame. The poet who channeled celestial music often could not grasp what he conveyed. Endowed with mystical gifts and a sacred mission, he became a conduit of Truth. Carried afar by print and an increasingly standardized French language, his portentous words spoke to the ear, the mind, and the soul.¹²

So it was with Nostredame. He most likely read León Hebreo, Cornelius Agrippa, and Christian kabbalists whose works—many of them published or republished in Lyon around this time—illuminated the truths of sacred texts and recovered classical notions of dreams and divine emanation. His friend Jean de Vauzelles, a priest and doctor of laws who descended from an old family of notaries, contributed to the renewal of Hebrew studies in Lyon’s humanist circles. There is no evidence that Nostredame consulted the kabbalah itself or secretly practiced Judaism. Still, Jewish traditions may well have left an imprint in his family. This might include a predilection for symbols and interpretation, respect for books (a sacred repository for a people deprived of power), and awe before the power of words. It is easy to make too much of such hypothetical filiations, but there is no reason to dismiss them either. It is equally easy to overlook Nostredame’s ambitions as a poet. For centuries, literary scholars have done just that, relegating his writings to some prophetic dustbin and keeping his pedestrian verse out of their anthologies. Only in recent years have some critics argued that, without equaling the best Renaissance poets, Nostredame produced an original mélange of poetry and melancholy prophecy. True, he never wrote odes or sonnets or presented himself as a superlative poet. Still, he adorned all of his almanacs with four-line poems—called présages, or portents—which he claimed to compose out of natural instinct and poetic frenzy. He provided one portent for the whole year, one for each month, and sometimes a fourteenth one as a bonus of sorts for faithful readers. This was his signature as an almanac writer.¹³

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The point is not to rehabilitate Nostredame as a leading Renaissance poet: readers will come to their own conclusions about the quality of his verse. But he considered himself a poet and wanted to be seen as one, and this says a great deal about the way his words were written and received. It is partly for this reason that he traveled to Lyon, a city whose cultural ebullience matched its commercial energy. Proximity to John Calvin’s Geneva opened Lyon to new religious movements. The Italian traders who had settled there in earlier decades had brought deep reverence for the Greco-Roman heritage and the verses of Petrarch. And the absence of a university or a leading law court (parlement) emboldened residents and visitors to broach all kinds of topics without fear of rebuke.

The workshops of the rue Mercière were full of learned, curious publishers who produced new editions of Boccaccio and published the leading mystic, hermetic, and Neoplatonist poets of the day. Wealthy families recited poetry in their homes, and so did successful artisans. The literary salons that convened in stately residences took verse most seriously. Poets traveled hundreds of miles to join the conversation. When Nostredame visited Lyon, the city’s poetic school still loomed large in France (within years, the rival Pléiade would supplant it). The verses of Maurice Scève, Louise Labé, and others expressed feelings of love and conveyed their vision of the cosmos. They also shaped the poet’s illustrious image.¹⁴

Nostredame did not belong to any school, but he joined the city’s literary circles during his visits. He entertained close ties with Gabrielle Simeoni, a learned writer with whom he shared a publisher, and dedicated one of his prognostications to Jean de Vauzelles, who was an accomplished poet and translator. He also became a protégé of Guillaume de Gadagne, scion of Lyon’s wealthiest family (one was rich like Gadagne in these parts of France). This banker and representative of the king surrounded himself with prominent artists and writers, and Nostredame made the cut. As Gadagne’s houseguest in 1557, he must have attended his lavish receptions and mingled with members of Lyon’s intellectual elite. Later that year, he dedicated a Prognostication to the hospitable Gadagne, who had introduced him to persons of “honor, conviction, nobility, and erudition.” This most likely included poets.¹⁵

A single portent suffices to convey the pulse of Nostredame’s poetry. These are the verses that had been linked to Henri II’s death in 1559:

It is a quatrain, a brief, condensed genre that was being rediscovered after centuries of neglect and now used in psalms, adages, courtly epigrams, and moral instruction. The original French conveys features that are lost in translation, including internal line breaks (or caesuras) that made readers pause after the fourth syllable and allowed the poet to create anticipation. The French also displays the ten-syllable lines (or decasyllables) that were then so common as well as the crossed abab rhyming pattern. Some poets were now composing alexandrines, poems with twelve-syllable lines, and alternating feminine and masculine rhymes (the former ended with a mute e, as in la France). Not Nostredame. In fact, he was not beholden to literary convention or fashion. Poets liked the quatrain because its simple rhyme patterns enabled them to focus on a single idea and convey weighty and even heroic or moral topics. Nostredame made it his preferred literary form but did not hesitate to move from one theme to another. His rhymes were sometimes considered mediocre because they involved the final syllable alone (cristal and espouvantal); or else syllables that were spelled the same way but pronounced differently (such as cher [pronounced share] and boucher [pronounced booh-shay]). He also slipped in the odd eleven- or twelve-syllable line and occasionally followed the caesura with a word that began with a consonant rather than a vowel (see the first line). This went against usage.¹⁶

Still, the poet proved good enough to build on the quatrain’s didactic foundation while subtly redirecting it toward the future and entering a long continuum of verse prophecy. Poetry did not merely endow his words with gravitas and an aura that other almanac writers lacked. It also provided a conduit into the order of the cosmos, the designs of nature, the immensity of God, and the tumult of the world. Ultimately, it all came back to words, both verse and prose. Nouns and adjectives flashed like lone strobe lights in his multihued universe, but they also tapped the others’ energy. “Chosen unthankful, death bewailed, joy, alliance”: who could tell whether these were placeholders in miniature narratives or pick-up sticks in a game of verbal Mikado? Perhaps it did not matter. Married with alliteration and consonance (profanés, pillez, expoliés), layered with detail and texture, his words flattened chaos and imposed order on time and space. They also intensified moods and foreboding, pulling the reader toward an inexpressible climax. “All dying by sword, fire, cannon, plague”: Nostredame could show and tell at the same time.¹⁷

One computer analysis has identified eight thousand words in his vocabulary: more than the Old Testament, equal to Milton, half that of Shakespeare. Nostredame drew from Latin and Greek and sometimes the Provençal of southern France, but mostly he restricted himself to French. In the sixteenth century, Italian was the language of choice for commercial transactions and religious exchanges with Rome. Latin retained its primacy in learning, literature, prophecies, and letters between European humanists. Most residents of France spoke dialects, but French was gaining ground as a means of communication in cities and a prestigious literary form. A decade before Nostredame began writing almanacs, a royal ordinance had prescribed the use of French rather than Latin in all contracts, judicial acts, and official documents. This would guard against ambiguity. Nostredame did not mind ambiguity, but he found that French had qualities of expression that he could not find in Latin. “I have written out my work in French,” he wrote a customer, “because it is nourished by the Gallic muses.” French would also enable him to reach a larger urban readership, boost his sales, and perhaps bolster his legitimacy by obtaining widespread appeal. The language anchored his predictions within the everyday lives of readers while preserving their sacral aura.¹⁸

Some words surfaced again and again: death and tumult, loss and conflict, king and alliance, old and new. Like branches caught in the whirlpool, they swirled on the surface of a current that overflowed with discord, surprises, and reversals. Nostredame foretold the “adventures” of the year to come in tableaus of mesmerizing if unsettling beauty, full of heroic hatreds and high emotions. Conspirators schemed and staged nocturnal assaults. Some cities rose while others fell. Fire and water made sudden irruptions. Women fainted from joy. People were jailed and then escaped. Secret letters led to treason or deadly poisons. The flow of words often proved irresistible: “the unusual nocturnal sounds forebode a pestilential affliction.” Elsewhere, one finds startling set pieces. In one of them, weeds grow knee-high in city streets while the sun bakes the land dry. Another announces a conflict between Europeans and Muslims. Factions would band against others, mutineers would return, barbarians would invade by land and sea, and then the jailers themselves would land in prison. And yet nothing would be settled. The prediction ended starkly, with deeper friendship among savage beasts than among human beings. These almanacs and prognostications were episodes in a human drama that kept promising an impossible denouement.¹⁹

Nostredame left nothing out. He piled it on. “Cut up, hallowed, new, old, fateful”: there were hundreds of such lines. One thinks of the orderly series, the colonnades and rows of galleries that the Renaissance found so satisfying. Nostredame nonetheless stood out in his single-mindedness. “Snow, ice, great frost, winds, rains, fogs, cunning weather, and frequent rainfalls across the western regions.” His series coupled adjectives and nouns, with or without articles. They owed as much to the notary’s inventories as to the physician’s diagnoses. His prognostications in fact recorded the plague’s symptoms: inextinguishable thirst, dry mouth, vomiting, bowel movements, and yellowed skin. Alongside these enumerations came repetition. Many people, he said, would be “beaten, robbed, fleeced, & many temples desecrated, plundered, ransacked.” There are repetitions of synonymous adjectives, repetitions of fragments in the same quatrain (“for forty years”), and repetitions that simply accentuate the sense of abundance (“many and various shipwrecks”). Even though Nostredame wrote repetitive sentences in some of his letters, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this was a literary effect, a means of expressing the abundance of his world or averting the distressing possibility of emptiness—what contemporaries called horror vacui.²⁰

Nostredame encompassed every facet of his world: military sieges and shipwrecks, plots and papal elections, endless rain, cattle lost, hunger and scabies, passages by land and sea, brothers knocked for a loop, dignitaries signing treaties and others engaging in public debates. All lives were connected; all human activities had an impact on one another. His prognostication for 1558 ended with the hope that God would grant us a year of peace, love, and harmony. Most other prognosticators wrote about the weather or comets rather than politics. When they did broach the topic, it was through terse, factual, general remarks about wars, rebellions, and the high and mighty. The Englishman Cornelys Scute thus devoted separate sections of his 1554 prognostication to the leading rulers of the day. Nostredame’s purview was broader: namely, the collective destinies of cities, regions, nations, and Christendom. By making politics high and low a defining trait of his almanacs, Nostredame upheld the genre’s traditional domains while adding another horizon. As discord between Catholics and Protestants intensified, poets found it difficult to confine themselves to the celestial realm. They were public figures, too. As such, they were expected to endorse parties, justify causes, denounce enemies, and provide alternatives to crisis. Nostredame’s marriage of poetry and politics suggests that he had grasped this as well.²¹

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Once he had settled matters with his publishers and renewed his ties with Lyon’s intelligentsia, Nostredame packed up and headed home. He would be back soon enough to look after his next almanac or prognostication—the ephemeral publications that first drew attention to Nostradamus. Sales, earnings, and success mattered to him. But such ambitions did not compromise Nostredame’s depictions of the cosmic and social orders. He continued to view himself as a guide and a friend. And the words always came first.

Nostredame was not the only one to string words into series or pictorial tableaus of abundance. Poets such as Maurice Scève and Pierre de Ronsard composed rhymes with greater skill. Only in the twentieth century was the stupefying, rule-free Nostradamus reclaimed as a model for a literature that freed itself from the shackles of middle-class convention. In 1966, the Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars told the Paris Review that he had been reading these predictions and admiring their linguistic virtuosity for forty years. “I gargle with them, I regale myself with them,” he said. “As a great French poet, Nostradamus is one of the greatest.”²²

One literary critic has suggested that Nostredame was first and foremost a crib artist, whose mix of ancient and recent sources prefigured European avant-gardes. Nostredame’s true literary talent resided, it is true, in his powers of creative amalgamation, but it went farther than that. The man seemed to have seen, read, and experienced everything. His journeys from one province and one world to another had introduced him to all kinds of people, languages, and moods. Some travelers simply march across new lands. Nostredame, in contrast, soaked everything in and then made these lands his own by tapping assorted literary strands and emotional registers. He was both a pathological hoarder who left nothing out and a diamond cutter who chiseled words into fine stones. Instead of inventing new literary forms, he stretched the boundaries of existing ones and then filled them with infinite possibilities. His prognostications bulged over with meandering sentences that were at once precise and nebulous. His lean almanacs melded the tangible and the evanescent. And his portents were crisp, nervous concentrates of the mundane and the arcane. Together, they created a literary world whose visceral intensity belonged to Nostradamus alone—or, rather, to Nostradamus and everyone else. The omnivorous writer gave his readers everything they could have expected. And more.²³