Chapter 4

Fame and Infamy

During the last months Michel de Nostredame’s agony grew unbearable.

Arthritic pain began in his hands, descended to his knees, and finally reached his feet. His joints swelled. Contemporaries called it dropsy, though today we might speak of arteriosclerosis. Composing horoscopes became an ordeal. During one stretch, he could not leave his bed for twenty-one straight days. Nostredame felt his strength decline. “May God allow me to live until then to describe the threats inscribed in the stars,” he wrote in his 1565 almanac. In June 1566, he finalized his will with his notary and left instructions regarding the future of his children. The astrologer then made his final confession and devoted eight days to acts of contrition. On July 2, he died at the age of sixty-three. It was the day of the Feast of the Visitation of Notre-Dame.¹

Nostredame was buried that very day. Funerals of well-to-do Catholics were now becoming theatrical affairs, with as many masses and priests as families could afford. Without belonging to Salon’s upper crust, Nostredame was wealthy enough to bequeath a house and a respectable two thousand gold écus to his descendants. He also left donations to beggars and friars in order to speed the release of his soul from purgatory. The funeral procession unfolded “with full pomp and circumstances,” reported his son César. His two executors, a burgher and a nobleman, led the party to the Church of the Convent of Saint-François, home to Franciscan monks known as Cordeliers. Nostredame was buried inside the thirteenth-century church, against an inner wall. As he had requested, four candles surrounded his body.²

Most people were still buried in collective graves at this time, either in churchyards or cemeteries. Burial inside a church was reserved for high clerics, gentlemen, merchants, and intellectual luminaries. It was an honor that priests and monks sold, sometimes with zeal. In Salon, members of leading families usually asked to be buried in Saint-François. They did so for spiritual reasons and to secure an undisturbed resting place (cemeteries were also used for dances, markets, and animal grazing). Some also sought to display their social status and leave a permanent trace of their distinctive virtue. The rituals of death became a means of self-glorification for individuals, families, and dynasties.³

Nostredame’s tomb lay near the church entrance and projected a foot from the wall. It contained a bust of the man in his later years, a small portrait, and his coat of arms. The epitaph, written by his widow, praised “the most famous Nostradamus who among men has deserved by the opinion of all to set down in writing with a quill almost divine the future events of the entire universe caused by the celestial influences.” The encomium begins with fame and public acclaim rather than skills or inspiration. This, Anne Ponsarde seemed to say, was incontrovertible proof of powers that no other seer could match. Others agreed. Customers addressed their letters to the very famous Master Michel Nostradamus. A Hungarian wrote that “one name alone is on everybody’s lips, that of Nostradamus, famous among all.” An Italian marveled that his reputation spread so fast that the winds must have carried his name from France, flying gloriously above the peaks and cliffs of the Alps.⁴

Nostradamus was not the first celebrity in the West. In the literary realm alone, Dante and others had come before him. But no secular figure arguably proved more intriguing in Renaissance Europe, and none garnered more attention for his popularity. The mine owner Rosenberger wrote him that he had grown “aware of your celebrity a long time ago because your reputation was universally widespread.” Nostradamus’s superlative fame was itself becoming a source of awe. One could now become famous for being famous (though not only for that). But this fame also generated controversy. The factors that lay behind it—not merely the predictions but also the ubiquity and the disregard for boundaries—touched a nerve. The Nostradamus phenomenon captured these facets of modern culture, and this made all of the difference.⁵

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The fame began with the plague doctor’s reputation. To sell a new collection of potions, one publisher told potential readers that Nostredame himself had invented some of them. He fully expected this imprimatur to boost sales. Building on medicine, astrology further magnified his fame. It was his “almost divine skill in wisely interpreting the future from the stars” that had made him so famous, explained one of his correspondents. Afterward, prophecies, visits to the French court, and his prediction regarding the death of Henri II brought his fame to yet another plane. Nostredame’s publications were “praised to the skies throughout tripartite Gaul, admired by foreigners, eulogized by everyone,” raved one of his horoscope customers. Like other facets of the phenomenon, Nostredame’s celebrity was ultimately rooted in print and media culture.⁶

This fame benefited from rising literacy, especially in the higher reaches of society but also among urban artisans, tradesmen, and apothecaries. In England, roughly one man in ten and one woman in a hundred could read. And many chose almanacs or prognostications. Nostradamus’s were read by lords and merchants, prelates and priests, diplomats and officers. A military aide consulted one during the Spanish siege of Saint-Quentin and was convinced that it predicted defeat for France. In Paris, a gentleman received a new shipment of his almanacs in 1554. The English Lord Lumley owned at least one, as did the French cardinal François de Tournon—a gift from a church chancellor. In Normandy, Gilles Picot de Gouberville had several in his library, along with books by Rabelais and Machiavelli. This lord, who lived off the revenues of his estate and dispensed justice in his seigneurial court, had probably bought them at a nearby fair.⁷

Evidence becomes skimpier as we descend the social ladder, but Nostredame apparently had considerable success. When a flood hit the French city of Nîmes in 1557, residents turned to a quatrain about an overflowing river. Two years later, an English ambassador reported that sailors accepted his predictions about imminent storms and shipwrecks. Around the same time, a French servant took three books with him as he left for England: one was religious, the other a work of popular entertainment, and the third a prognostication signed Nostradamus. According to one contemporary a few decades later, it was the common voice of the people that had brought a quatrain to the attention of the duke de Guise in 1588.⁸

Things were different in the countryside, where literacy lagged behind and printed matter remained scarce. Still, Nostradamus’s words must have been present in some form. Plenty of rural folk traveled to towns, where they could purchase his publications at fairs. Sailors and soldiers could bring them home when visiting their native village. Servants working for the likes of Gouberville could peruse almanacs on his estate and then share with others what they had found. Word-of-mouth communication remained much more prevalent than private reading. People listened to wandering preachers and tale singers and attended public readings in alehouses or village squares. Friends and kin commonly read to one another, whether Bible selections, tales of adventure, or prophetic poems. It is likely that some read fragments of Nostradamus as well. His predictions, it is true, lack the daring deeds and climaxes of traditional tales. Unlike epics, they do not trace the exploits and adventures of a noble hero. They are difficult to sing. But they share features of oral storytelling: formulas and rich images, troves of clauses and adjectives, repetition, and multiple levels of meaning.⁹

Nostradamus thus circulated between the aristocratic library and the boisterous marketplace—or, more broadly, between a learned culture and the popular one of peasants and artisans. These cultures shared expectations and beliefs (in marvelous prodigies, for instance), but they also differed in their languages, their cultural horizons, and their relationships to print. The itinerant doctor Nostredame penned words that spoke to all, but in different ways. Some people consulted his predictions at home while others did so in taverns or under a tree. Some finished dense prognostications in one sitting while others struggled to make out a quatrain. Some were drawn to his political prophecies while others limited themselves to weather forecasts. Social background was a factor, but it did not determine everything. Gouberville instructed his men to sow wheat on a given day in 1558 because Nostradamus had predicted that it would yield ample crops. Like countless others, he read his almanacs and prognostications as a matter of course, or planning. Others turned to Nostradamus after natural catastrophes. There were several ways of consulting his predictions.¹⁰

Nostredame proved so successful that one Englishman declared in 1560 that he “reigned here so like a tyrant with his soothsayings that without the good luck of his prophecies it was thought that nothing could be brought to effect.” By the end of the century, he had entered biographical dictionaries. The Portraits of Several Illustrious Men, for instance, included 144 French clerics, officers, poets, scholars—including Michel Nostradamus, royal doctor and great mathematician and astrologer. His portrait was sandwiched between a naturalist named Pierre Belon and the architect Guillaume Philander, two admirable men who soon fell into oblivion. This did not happen to the astrologer from Salon.¹¹

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Personal accomplishments had yielded renown and a reputation. Reputation endowed with widespread visibility generated fame. During the late Middle Ages, renown came to reward military prowess, and then learning, wisdom, eloquence, and probity as well. As merit and the judgment of public opinion acquired greater weight, all kinds of people launched careers that rested in part on sterling reputations. They did so in such domains as politics, education, learning, and religion. The Renaissance brought new media and new opportunities for advancement that made it easier to attain fame. Once the pursuit became more acceptable, artists and humanists embraced fame as a fair ambition, an incentive to accomplish great things, and a just reward for their accomplishments. We cannot speak yet of a celebrity culture, with unknowns shooting to prominence and followers seeking to know them intimately. Still, fame had its secular heroes—adventurers, mapmakers, artists. Authors likewise set themselves up as independent masters of their craft and sometimes as print celebrities. Erasmus did so. Christopher Marlowe did so. The Italian astrologer Girolamo Cardano did so as well (his discovery by a Nuremberg printer was, he said, “the beginning of my fame”).¹²

The self-made Nostredame did the same thing. Here, too, agility trumped outright invention. His multiple editions, quick translations, and savvy use of patrons played their part. And the name! Nostredame had the acumen or good fortune to coin one that captured Europe’s collective imagination. Even his critics spoke of his “sublime name.” In the Middle Ages, reputations had revolved around a name (nomen) rather than achievements alone, as if names held magical power, as if words could act upon the world. (Psychologists call this nominal realism.) The scholar who sought renown thus had first to name himself. In the intellectual world of the Renaissance, humanists likewise coined names to obtain respect and stature. Most latinized their names in order to display their connection to the classical tradition. Nostredame used two distinct patronyms at once, which was unusual. By the mid-1550s, he was publishing his Prophecies and other publications as Michel de Nostredame (or Nostre-Dame) while signing almanacs and private letters as Michel Nostradamus. Predecessors and contemporaries included the epigram writer Jacobus Securivagus, the astrologer Regiomontanus (Johannes Müller von Königsberg), and countless others. Still, it was the name of Nostradamus that would resonate loudest across the continent. Was it its play on the Catholic Notre-Dame (Our Lady)? Its meter and sonority, equally euphonious in the main European languages? Or its plasticity, its ability to generate multiple expressions and word games? There is no way to tell, but the name took off.¹³

This name provided gravity and mystery, intrigue and playfulness (people everywhere used it as a toy, said one contemporary). It was also part of a public image. Nostredame began one prognostication with this epigraph from Ovid: “May the universe praise my name against those who have so often deemed me dead.” Fashioning such an image for public consumption was a favorite activity of Renaissance authors and artists. Since human beings were malleable, it followed that eloquent words could shape individual personas. And given the competition among writers, artists, and prognosticators, it was becoming necessary to sing one’s own praise, or at least to control the way one came across. Nostredame fashioned such an image as well. Intentionally or not, he became the first draftsman of his public persona.¹⁴

His prefaces and the woodcuts that adorned his publications portrayed a diligent astrologer at work in his study. He scrutinized the skies at night, made careful calculations, and uncovered hidden patterns. His workbench, the open tome and weighty books, the portable sphere and compass—all of this conveyed seriousness of purpose. Other astrologers used such woodcuts, which drew from medieval images of prognosticators and studious evangelists. Still, pictures and words came together perfectly in this case to outline a reputable man, rooted in a city and devoted to the “spirit of truth.” This persona was familiar to contemporary readers, but Nostredame also stood out in his divine inspiration and his concern for others. By addressing his son in the preface to hisProphecies, he came across as paternal and protective—a father to all of his readers. Even when his predictions seemed incongruous, he had to trust his instincts, he said, and share what he had seen in order to benefit humankind. “A commiseration and piety is come upon me,” he wrote in 1559. All of this distinguished Nostredame from swindlers, black magicians, and sorcerers, who riled up the crowds by playing upon fantastic things. Charlatans looked out for themselves, but this honest astrologer shielded ordinary folk from diseases, ignorance, and temptation.¹⁵

Nonetheless, Nostredame’s voice could seem arrogant. It grew forceful when he lambasted those who dared to contradict him or when he warned the Gallic fleet to avoid Corsica: “Once captive, you’ll believe me yet.” A Parisian customer once warned the astrologer that he seemed to deem himself superior to others. This was but one facet of his persona. Nostredame also depicted himself as the greatest sinner in the world, implored God to grant him a pure soul, and acknowledged his limitations. Future afflictions troubled him as much as they would any ordinary person. More than once, he expressed consternation before dire turns of events. More than once, he acknowledged feeling sorrow, shame, or fear before the calamities that flowed from his pen: “The western planets predict some sinister accidents … so strange that tears come to my eyes as I hold my quill.” Contemporaries could picture the astrologer in his study, tearing up while contemplating insights that he could not keep to himself. By admitting that he could err, Nostredame told his readers that he was as responsible as they were for God’s ire. By emphasizing his humanity, he told them that he, too, was subject to the vicissitudes that afflicted them. All belonged to the same fragile community.¹⁶

Like the man, this persona straddled registers. Extraordinary yet flawed, confident yet tentative, coldly authoritative yet emotional, Nostradamus captured a range of human behavior. Readers could relate to and even identify with someone who shared their pain. They could also trust someone who transcended it. The extraordinary person who could tap all of these expectations deserved widespread fame.

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Unless he did not. Success bred jealousy and scrutiny and all kinds of questions about Nostredame. Could he really predict the future? If so, where did he find inspiration? Was he an astrologer, a prophet, or both? A true prophet or an impostor? A good Christian or a satanic envoy? Had fame not rewarded a fraud, or worse?

After all, his predictions did not always come true. Many readers, it is true, could live with such errors. Belief was the prevailing disposition of mind, an effortless acceptance of otherworldly forces that escaped causes and possiblity. And no one, not even the divinely anointed, could be right every time. The French king’s ability to cure some sick subjects by touching them was deemed miraculous. Nostredame’s ability to predict some events and not others could likewise be deemed prophetic. But there were contemporaries who saw these mistakes as proof of serious shortcomings. The Anglican theologian Matthew Parker distanced himself from what he called fantastical hodgepodge (he also denied having hesitated before accepting the position of archbishop of Canterbury due to ominous Nostradamian warnings). Others reviled the “infection of these pestilential poisoned lying prophecies.” His slightest error, Nostredame complained, aroused endless mockery. Two weeks before his death, he asked a lord to protect him against “the calumniators and mischief makers” who spoke ill of him.¹⁷

Nostredame was surrounded by a multitude of detractors. The first was Julius Scaliger, the Italian philologist who had welcomed the young man in Agen but reportedly grew envious and repudiated him as an ill-intentioned buffoon. Scaliger’s diatribes remained private, but others made their views known. Prognosticators, poets, and clergymen—both Catholic and Protestant—used print to denounce Nostredame’s almanacs and prophecies. The jurist and lord Antoine Couillart penned vitriolic pamphlets from his estate in central France. The doctor and prognosticator Laurent Videl published a Declaration of the Abuses, Ignorance and Seditions of Michel Nostradamus in 1558. Other French critics hid behind pseudonyms such as Hercules le François. In England, a twenty-two-year-old Puritan polemicist named William Fulke denounced Nostredame in a vitriolic Antiprognosticon. The astrologer Francis Coxe faced charges of magic and sorcery, recanted, and then wrote A Short Treatise Declaringe the Detestable Wickednesse, of Magicall Sciences that starred the reprehensible Nostredame in 1561. All of these authors expressed their outrage in vivid, oftentimes violent terms. Nostradamus touched a nerve.¹⁸

This was because the seer who dipped into all divinatory methods and media was both ubiquitous and exceptional. Girolamo Cardano came under attack for his astrology, Merlin for prophecies, Albertus Magnus for magic, and the fictitious Matthieu Laensberg for almanacs that bore his name. Nostradamus, however, could embody all of this at once. By lambasting him, Hercules le François condemned all “sorcerers, charmers, diviners, bewitchers, magicians and enchanters.” The name of Nostradamus thus provided a way of opining on the contentious matter of divination. Some of the questions at stake—regarding its relationship to divine providence, for instance—had proven more explosive during the Middle Ages than the Renaissance. Leading Catholics now accepted a natural astrology that affected the body and passions while leaving human will intact. Still, astrology and magic could reconfigure humanity’s relationship with the cosmological world. Evangelicals went after judicial astrology while Calvinists denounced dark prophets who turned the faithful away from the mysteries of the Word, an omnipotent God, a redemptive Christ, and belief in predestination. It is a “foolish curiosity to judge according to the stars all that must happen to men,” John Calvin wrote in 1549.¹⁹

Nostredame’s lugubrious language and his suggestion that astral bodies determined human behavior threatened key tenets of grace, free will, moral autonomy, and efficacy of prayer. Grappling with divine secrets was folly and utter arrogance. Nostradamus thus came to embody error, a blasphemous assault against the majesty of God and public trust. The sorcerer communicated with demons, said the doctor Videl, and he infused his quatrains with “diabolical intentions.” Some Catholics equated his predictions with the satanic designs of Protestants. A few years after his death, a French canon recounted a telling story. In 1560, he said, Nostredame had spent a few days in Lyon. One evening, during a dinner with eminent burghers, he walked to a window and contemplated a church. His fellow guests wanted to know what was on his mind. He replied with a prediction: enemies of Catholicism would try to destroy the edifice and fail, because God would protect the sacred structure. Two years later, the Church withstood a Protestant assault during the French Wars of Religion. Satan had clearly sent a warning through his favorite Nostradamus. The canon who recounted this story did not mention his Jewish origins, but others did. Scaliger, for one, disparaged his “Judaic ramblings” and accused him of practicing kabbalah. Nostradamus was not one of us.²⁰

And yet he proved so popular. As the number of astrologers and published prognosticators exploded, rivalries heated up. Some of his competitors depicted Nostredame as a mediocre soothsayer whose inane imaginings and technical incompetence flouted the rules of astrology. Others denounced an ambitious man who benefited more than anyone else from his predictions. When Videl and others went after him, they sought not only to stop his climb but also to bolster principles and a craft and a social status that amateurs now threatened. There were simply too many newcomers talking “off the top of their heads about things in which they had never learned so much as a single letter,” complained one German prognosticator. All of these attacks created a counterpersona of Nostradamus. As a seductive impostor, he led the pack of charlatans and prognosticators who were posing as doctors and astrologers. As a lunatic madman, he coined a jargon that challenged human deduction. As a savvy upstart, he attained a level of fame that challenged Christian humility and social hierarchies. And as a callous soothsayer, he held a firm grip over European psyches. His word seeped across Gaul, lamented Scaliger, and infiltrated the minds of princes and ordinary folk. This “sweet and delicious poison blinded and bewitched the wits of men,” explained the astrologer Francis Coxe. His predictions fostered chimeras, heretical notions, and, in due time, disobedience and riots. Nostradamus did not only threaten the salvation of souls. He also imperiled the future of the republic, said Videl. The stakes were nothing less than the religious and social foundations of Europe.²¹

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Critics were so incensed that they gave Nostredame new monikers. He became Monstradamus, Monstradabus, and the “monstre d’abus.” These names played on the French word abus (breach of trust) and on monstrosity. Hercules le François loathed “this hideous monster” and his bewitching, twisted enigmas. Monsters had long fascinated Europeans, but they now seemed to be moving from the margins of society into the center. Reports about conjoined twins or bodies with multiple heads were so numerous that contemporaries struggled to keep track. They responded with wondrous delight in the variety of nature and horror before creatures that deviated from the norm. Like other marvels, monsters could transmit a divine warning about human corruption, call for repentance, and tap eschatological fears. The same was true of Nostradamus’s portents. Monsters also defied the natural order’s decorum and moral codes. As monstrosity became a form of invective in Europe, so did the ubiquitous creature Monstradamus.²²

There was something yet more disturbing about monsters. They blurred boundaries—between human beings and beasts, humanity and divinity, the natural and the miraculous, and good and evil. They clouded what had to be kept distinct and melded what had to be kept apart. Monsters were partially different from ordinary human beings, and this made them yet more unpure. It was impossible to define or tolerate such liminal creatures. Boundaries between social groups, religious communities, and ways of knowing were essential, for they told people how the world was organized, what place they occupied within it, and how they should conduct themselves. But the changes that took place during the late Renaissance—the print media, the possibilities for social mobility, the confessional warfare, the new outlooks on the cosmos—made such social and conceptual boundaries increasingly porous. This was a source of opportunities in terms of careers and knowledge, no doubt, but also of deep-seated anxieties about stability and order.²³

No one captured this more acutely than Nostredame, the man who reviled rapid change and yet benefited from it. The maverick circulated across realms without belonging exclusively to any one. The insider-outsider who neither embraced nor rejected dominant protocols resided between true astrology and a newfangled one, between art and commerce, between tradition and innovation. His predictions went beyond the limits of nature, said a French gentleman. The interloper who erected bridges between disparate places and domains showed all too clearly that older partitions no longer held. His accessible but mystifying language seemed to blur the line between divine perfection and human understanding, between the ordinary and the extraordinary. And the very grounds of understanding appeared to be in perpetual motion in his works. In the late 1550s, an anonymous poet denounced “this great liar Monstradabus.” The following verses began to circulate around the same time: “Nostra damus cum verba damus, nan fallere nostrum est, / Et cum verba damus nil nisi nostra damus” (We give our own things when we give false things, for it is our lot to deceive, and when we give false things, we are only giving our own things). When Nostra damus was read as Nostradamus, the verses mocked the empty, deceitful nature of the astrologer’s words: “We are only giving the words of Nostradamus.” The prognosticator who sometimes recognized what was certain and sometimes imagined what was possible also voiced deeper uncertainty regarding truth and falsehood, authenticity and dissimulation.²⁴

It was not just that, like classic prophets, Nostredame operated in the breach and relayed divine proclamations to ordinary mortals. The cryptic prognosticator who practiced his arts at the intersection of humanism and divination made his era’s underlying contradictions and anxieties all too explicit. Targeting him hence provided a way of denouncing abstract threats, distancing oneself from offending forces, and affirming indispensable norms. Whereas some people believed in Nostradamus, Videl, Coxe, and others needed this transgressor to redraw boundaries and exorcise the fears that lurked outside and inside their own souls. By turning Nostradamus into Monstradamus, they began to restore the order of their world.

The debate heated up during the last decade of Nostredame’s life. As skeptics grew more vocal, supporters came to his defense. One aristocratic writer and bibliographer from France accused detractors of confusing the astrologer with lowly forgers and imitators. The law student Tubbe promised Nostredame that he would fight his rivals, “these incompetent giants in the art of calculation who, as I have heard, are slandering you.” And Ronsard vindicated a fellow Catholic poet whose prophecies had been confirmed by recent marvels. (Given his reliance on Catherine de Médicis’s patronage and protection at the court, Ronsard had little to gain by criticizing her astrologer.) False accusations against Nostredame reflected poorly, Ronsard said, on Protestants and people who discounted God’s warnings. “Poor France.” This show of support inflamed Protestant pamphleteers. They inveighed yet more passionately against a demonic impostor who was leading Europe astray. “O crazed Ronsard, how dare you welcome the damned Nostredame, approve his claims … when God denies them.” Among the paradoxes that Nostradamus displayed, let us include the fact that faith (Protestant, in this case) could prove more cautious than reason.²⁵

Nostredame may have welcomed the controversy. We will never know, but he had seen the detractors coming. He had written in the Prophecies that some people would take issue with his sweeping predictions. Once the attacks began, he defended himself against what he called misunderstandings, exaggerations, and calumny. Then he counterpunched. He dismissed his adversaries as ignorant asses whose minds were warped by envy, and devoted an entire quatrain to what he called inept critics. “Let those who read these lines consider them with care,” he wrote. “Astrologers, Fools & Barbarians, beware.” Nostredame also secured new patrons to hold these detractors at bay and recalibrated his persona. Some Renaissance elites were now fashioning personas that were in accord with social conventions. They did so through their dress, writing, and other such means. This process often required an alien force, a competing authority that had to be discovered or invented and then overcome. By defining himself publicly in opposition to his slanderers, Nostredame could come across as vulnerable or even a victim. Whereas his critics maligned what they could not understand, he probed the unknown. They insulted him, but this man of faith and common sense was incapable of harming other human beings. Taking the high road, he asked for forgiveness if he had unwittingly aggrieved anyone. All might still become friends one day, he said. Nostredame needed his detractors as much as they needed him.²⁶

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By the end of his life, Nostredame was bathed in fame and infamy. As an English astrologer put it a century later, “the Book hath procured him both a good, and a bad Fame.” All of this endowed Nostredame and his predictions with intrigue, drama, and aura. But it did so in a peculiar way. While his death reportedly saddened some residents of Salon, there were no reports of massive grief, no collective fervor or social movement born in its wake. Part of the problem is that neither his persona nor his supporters could make Nostredame appear virtuous or heroic. Christian virtues include charity, temperance, kindness, and humility. Classical virtue implies modest, often unrecognized devotion to the public good. As for heroes, they battle the mighty or dominant norms in the name of justice and freedom. By overcoming challenges and learning from misdeeds, they provide moral lessons or guidance. As Nostredame’s plague years receded into the past, so did the courageous, self-sacrificing doctor. In his place, there remained the prudent or famous astrologer and prophet. But prudence does not translate into courage, and fame neither edifies nor teaches self-sacrifice. An essayist once identified twenty-two components of the hero’s life story. Nostradamus’s included three at most: he was chosen by God, his demise proved mysterious (more about this shortly), and none of his children succeeded him. His life story never yielded a myth, a symbolic narrative about humanity or the natural universe that helped people think through contradictions.²⁷

Nostredame failed to generate a social movement for other reasons. The astrologer had been a personal adviser and a writer rather than a magnetic leader who sought to build a mass following. Mercurial and conservative, wary of sects and public opinion, he never tried to organize people around a common cause. Similarly, his legitimacy always rested on words. People interacted with Nostradamus through horoscopes and publications rather than prayer, intercession, or public gatherings. From the start, the phenomenon thus revolved around individual relationships rather than communal rites. There was no religious apparatus here, no institutions or sacraments, no explicit admonitions or pathways to salvation.

As a result, Nostredame never became a saintlike figure. I found no accounts of people praying to him for solace or assistance. Collective pilgrimage routes never converged around his tomb. Instead, people made their way to Salon on their own. Prior to the French Revolution, the monks of Saint-François would welcome visitors at the church’s entrance and lead them on candlelit tours. They charged for this privilege and sometimes pushed copies of the Prophecies on the way out. Thomas Jefferson found these cicerones insufferable during his stopover in 1787—they “wish for your money and suppose you give it more willingly the more detail they provide,” he wrote in his diary—but others went along over the years. French queen Marie de Médicis paid a call in 1602. The geographer Louis Coulon made a special trip from Aix forty years later and penned a description of the tomb in his guidebook to France. John Locke transcribed Nostredame’s epitaph in his travel journal in 1676. Some visitors came for spiritual reasons; others paid homage to a fascinating author; and countless European travelers simply passed through Salon and found little else to see in a town that ranked far behind Avignon, the Pont du Gard, and other Provençal curiosities. Visitors hence made it to Saint-François from different directions, but all of them were very much aware of the astrologer who, as one of them put it, “has made Salon fashionable as his cradle, his home, and his burial ground.”²⁸

It was the fame again, the fame that drew people into his orbit and distinguished il famoso Michele Nostradamo from other astrologers and prophets, however well known. This fame revolved around a person whom people could situate in place and time. The soothsayer signed his prophecies; the venerable master adorned the covers of almanacs. Even detractors vowed to shake and needle the man whom they called Michel. Inside the church, explained one English traveler, a portrait by his son César represented him “exactly in his own proper Form and Dress.” Biography prevailed. It anchored Nostradamus in the lives of Europeans and provided a tangible author with whom they could converse, either in person or in their imagination.²⁹

But biography had company. There was also the name, which sometimes stood alone. In 1571, Nostredame was the only proper name to appear under astrologer and prognostication in a French collection of synonyms. And there were strange tales, which people began relating in hushed or incredulous tones after his death. Nostredame, they said, had forecast the exact day and hour of his passing. He may even have opened his crypt a day before expiring and asked a priest to perform the funeral service. His secretary told a slightly different story. As he bade his master good night on the eve of his passing, the old man took a sheet of paper and wrote, “my death is near.” The next morning, the secretary found the astrologer’s lifeless body slumped next to his bench. His thoughts, like those of others, went at once to one of Nostredame’s last portents: “Will be found dead near the bed and bench.”³⁰