Chapter D: D. considers this to relate to King George, and he remarks that the (1)

King exercised a stronger control than it was possible for Queen Anne to do. The German prince ascending the throne of gold certainly seems to point to George I. But Brunswick is not a very far country. It might be said that modern constitutional government was established first by the Georges, so serfdom and _les eaux_, or the people and their so-called rights, met together, but then you would have to interpret figuratively the last line: authority (_la dame_) serves, or is to become subordinate to, the phantom of Freedom, the time of reverence and good feeling having gone by. This, I say, might be so interpreted, but it does not carry much more conviction with it than does the meaning found by Garencières. He will have it to be a prophecy relating to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, called German because of German ancestry. His gilded throne was the gilded ship he sailed in. He made slavery and waters meet, because on landing he began to conquer Germania,—that lady who was no more worshipped afterwards as she had been before.

GEORGE I. AND PEACE (1714-1727).

_Century X.—Quatrain 42._

Le regne humain d’Anglique geniture,
Fera son regne paix union tenir:
Captive guerre demy de sa closture,
Longtemps la paix leur fera maintenir.

_Translation._

The human throne of English geniture will make its rule to
maintain peace and union. War will be captive, or at least
confined to half its usual area. (George will contend only with
Spain. Peace abroad and an endeavour to maintain union at home,
against the Pretender’s efforts.) Thus peace will be secured to
the country for a long stretch of years.

We have already given our interpretation to D. D.’s next quatrain (III. 57, p. 166). He discovers from it that George shall never want for an heir to the throne up to the Day of Judgment. Myself I see nothing of the kind to be warranted out of Nostradamus. He seems here to be contrasting the numerous changes in Britain with the happy stability of France. I should have made no reference to this, but for the opportunity it affords of introducing some of D. D.’s curious remarks upon the astrological portion of the verses.

At the Creation the Gemini stood in the house or sign Aries, near the equinoctial colure, which has but its own one pole; but they are now in the fourth house called Cancer, near the solstial colure, which has a double pole, viz. _Mundi et eclipticæ_. _Basharion_ is an Arabic word, and denotes _Humanus_. _Bashar_, a substantive _Caro, hominis cutis, homo_. In the three signs, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, which have successively formed the Caput Zodiaci, none but Gemini is of human figure; that sign must be intended by the word _Basharion_ (especially as the word is not _Basharion_ at all, but _Bastarnan_); so that, till the age of the world is six or seven thousand years old, _i.e._, till the Day of Judgment, this will last; and when the great day comes there will be found a direct descendant of that great king sitting on the English throne.

He has taken no notice of the _Pempotam_ and its duration of three hundred years, as a sort of measure of the seven changes, and Nostradamus nowhere says that the seventh change shall endure to the end of time. Like almost all interpreters, D. D. reads his own imagination into the prophecy.

The reader who cares about such explanations as these will find a great deal more of the same sort in Garencières’ annotations upon this quatrain. He remarks that the sign of Aries doth govern France, and that by doubling his pole is meant his returning a second time to the same place, so that the stars do promise France a long continuance in exaltation. He adds that if he were a great astrologer himself he should work out exactly the whole calculation, and he thinks Aries should come to that pole in the year 1845. But Garencières seems to have had no inkling whatever of the French Revolution of 1789, as forecast by Nostradamus; nor yet of the second Revolution of 1848, though he translated all the quatrains into English.

FRENCH REVOLUTION.

THE VULGAR ADVENT. [I. 160.]

_Century VI.—Quatrain 74._

La dechassée[216] au regne tournera,
Ses ennemies trouvés des conjurés:
Plus que jamais son temps triomphera,
Trois et septante à mort trop asseurés.

_Translation._

She who was proscribed will return to the kingdom,
Her enemies will be treated as conspirators;
More than ever her time (or empire) will triumph;
Seventy-three years its deathly domination is assured.

The Revolution (_la dechassée_), repressed in 1816, shall again obtain the government. Its enemies will be treated as conspirators, and it will be stronger than ever. Seventy-three years are assured to its death-like rule. I give this as M. le Pelletier does, but I see no reason whatever to think that it is correct. Garencières makes it apply to Charles II. of England, and the seventy-three put to death are those who abetted the murder of his father. This is very vague. Garencières reads _Le dechassé_. Here we may remark that Napoleon himself [p. 289] dates his nobility from the battle of Montenotte, 1797. Seventy-three years added to this yields us the remarkable date of the fall of his dynasty at Sedan, 1870.

_Century I.—Quatrain 3. (September 22, 1792.)_ [I. 162.]

Quand la lictiere du tourbillion versée,[217]
Et seront faces de leurs manteaux[218] couvers,
La republique par gens nouveaux vexée,[219]
Lors blancs et rouges jugeront à l’envers.

_Translation._

When the litter is turned topsy-turvey by the typhoon,
Men will mask their faces with the cloak of hypocrisy.
The republic will be troubled by new-risen men;
The white and red will judge by contraries.

This means that the royalists (_les blancs_) and the republicans (_les rouges_) will judge of everything from utterly opposed points of view. What was top will become bottom, when the blast blows the litter over; and, new men rising to power, the rest will cover their faces with hypocrisy, as men do with their cloaks in a storm. Compare the phrase _à l’envers_ with p. 175.

_Century II.—Quatrain 30._ [I. 163.]

Un qui les dieux d’Annibal infernaux
Fera renaistre, effrayeur des humains.
Oncq’[220] plus d’horreur ne[221] plus pire journaux
Qu’avint viendra par Babel aux Romains.[222]

_Translation._

There will be one who will revive the infernal gods
Of Hannibal, a terror to mankind.
Never arrived by Babel more horror
Nor worse day’s work than will fall upon Roman Catholics.

The meaning is, Napoleon shall arise, who will reawaken the solemn curse on Rome uttered by Hannibal, when he called the infernal gods to witness his hatred to her, to the terror of all mortals. Not Babel at the dispersion brought on the world more horror, nor days of more evil-ploughing for the present or seed-sowing for the future than shall fall upon the Roman world by him. This is much better than to limit it to an ecclesiastical area merely. We shall see that Charles V. is a sort of prototype of Napoleon, and Garencières adduces Charles V. as fulfilling this prophecy. Hannibal is also a prototype of Napoleon in attacking Italy by crossing the Alps.

_Century I.—Quatrain 14. (1789-1793.)_ [I. 164.]

De gent esclave chansons, chants et requestes
Captifs par[223] Princes et Seigneur aux prisons,
A l’advenir par idiots sans testes
Seront receus par[224] divines oraisons.

_Translation._

Songs, chants, and refrains of the slavish mob,
Whilst the Princes and King are captive in prison,
Shall be received in the future as oracles divine
By headless idiots deprived of judgment.

Songs—such as the Marseillaise while the King and Princes are imprisoned in the Temple,—songs of the mob (_gent esclave_) are received by brainless fools for divine utterances, even prayers (_divines oraisons_). _Vox populi, vox Dei_, is always the fools’ blasphemous formula, when swine chose Barabbas for Pontifex or Generalissimo. A cruelly entreated people; whose burdens are aggravated by wickedness in high places needlessly, above and beyond the grief, which every man is born to by the act of birth into a world of sickness, sorrow, and injustice; sighs heavily at this unduly heaped-up burden, and that sigh, that _vox populi_, runs upward like a lightning conductor to elicit fire from the clouds, coming back charged with electricity and thunder,—a _vox Dei_ of terrible divinity. But when scum rises to the direction, as with the Revolutionists, and is followed by some brutalized _sabreur_ aggrandizing himself as king of chaos and disorder, with shouts of subservient applause from the smutty mob, saying, “Herod, thou art a god,” the _vox populi_ that split the welkin once, is _now_ the _vox infernorum demonum_, the whole upspring and outcome of which is bestiality and lawlessness enthroned in defiance of the decalogue and heaven. Thenceforth the appeal of all good men and sane is, “Ye who worship God, good and alone from eternity, down with them.” The men must work and serve. This fiat is in the air, is in the sea, is on the earth. It is the _vox naturæ_, in comparison with which the people’s voice, _vox populi_, is nothing, beyond a momentary troubling of the silences.

The following quatrain I give for what it may be thought worth. M. le Pelletier thinks it to relate to the creation of assignats, December 19, 1789. It would be a pity to lose sight of his identification, if even some should presume it to be incorrect.

_Century I.—Quatrain 53. (December 19, 1789.)_ [I. 165.]

Las! qu’on verra grand peuple tourmenté,
Et la loi saincte en totale ruine;
Par autres loix toute la Chrestienté;
Quand d’or d’argent trouvé nouvelle mine.

_Translation._

Alas! how great a people shall tormented be,
And holy law in utter ruin laid:
By newer laws all Christendom is vexed,
With a new mine of gold and silver found.

We shall see, alas! the French people (_grand peuple_) agitated, the Catholic religion (_la loy saincte_) totally ruined, all Christendom put under new laws, when the National Assembly decrees that four hundred million assignats shall be issued (_nouvelle mine d’or_, etc.), secured on the property of the clergy, in the interests of the Revolution.

Older commentators applied this to the paper-money schemes of Law 1716; and Garencières finds the fulfilment in the discovery of the Spanish-American gold and silver mines.

A properly regulated paper-money issue, based on the taxation of a State, having absolutely no intrinsic value whatever in itself, could undoubtedly be converted into a circulating medium that would work more smoothly than any metallic one can, because the market value of the ore, employed as now in coinage, is perpetually introducing a fluctuation of values that conflicts with the nominal standard of the coin, so that the standard is never uniform. The currency required would never amount to a tenth part of the taxation leviable. Paper could therefore be destroyed at the Bank of England, or issued exactly according to the needs of trade and commerce. Fluctuation in the market value of metals would no longer affect the circulating medium in the least. Thus might one cause of recurrent panics be removed for ever. But can bank directors or ministers be trusted with such a responsibility? This hinges on honesty, and there is none to spare.

_Century VII.—Quatrain 14. (1789-1793.)_ [I. 166.]

Faux exposer viendra topographie,
Seront les cruches[225] des monumens ouvertes.
Pulluler secte, sancte philosophie,
Pour blanches noires, et pour antiques vertes.

_Translation._

Topography will soon be falsified,
The urns and sepulchres stand violate,
Sects swarm, and babbling sentiment
Black put for white, and green fruit for the ripe.

The curse be on them for changing old landmarks. The provinces turned into departments (by decree of the Assembly, December 22, 1789). The sepulture of Kings violated at St. Denis. Unholy sects will swarm, and a sentimental philosophy, of Rousseau and other maddened sophists, usurping the office of religion, black will stand for white, and green, crude fruit be substituted for the ripe.

_Century IV.—Quatrain 24._

Ouy soubs Terre Sainte Dame[226] voix feinte,
Humaine flamme pour Divine voit luire:
Fera des sœurs de leur sang terre tainte,
Et les saints temples par les impures destruire.

_Translation._

Hear from the ground a voice of Halidom,
A human flame pretending light divine.
The blood of sisters stains the earth to red,
And holy temples the impure destroy.

This, I think, refers to the sentimental advocacy of the Rights of man, as substitutionary of religion and faith in the literary movement of the eighteenth century. It would comprise Rousseau’s gospel of dirt and sentimentality, Voltaire’s substitution of wit for wisdom, and the science of the encyclopædists floating disoriented upon the waters of uncertainty, in lieu of the deep thought of the solitary thinkers that preceded them. These last were men who, heretofore walking humbly and without association in conspiracy, interrogated the universe, divinely sown with riddles in great abundance by a hand invisible, until they fell asleep into that hand, and awoke to the illuminated answers.

The blood of sisters was the wholesale slaughter of women that distinguished the Revolution, whilst church altars were desecrated by naked women, set there to personate the goddess of impure reason, feigning _la sante dame_.

The quatrain 25 that follows this in the text of Nostradamus I now give; but this verse 24, so far as I have seen, has never been commented upon nor has the connection been pointed out. Yet this stanza furnishes the reasons why the stars became overclouded to a people that were benighted, _par ces raisons_, as the reader will perceive by the second line that succeeds this.

_Century IV.—Quatrain 25._ [I. 167.]

Corps sublimes[227] sans fin à l’œil visibles,
Obnubiler[228] viendront par ces raisons.
Corps front comprins,[229] sens[230] chief[231] et invisibles.
Diminuant les sacrées oraisons.

_Translation._

The infinite stars are links that light to doubt,
And drop the pall of night upon the soul:
The eye and front of man,—and soul,—grown cerebral,
God and His host withdraw; and with them prayer!

M. le Pelletier considers that Nostradamus attributes these effects to the reasonings hostile to the faith that improved optical instruments will introduce, as they suggest a plurality of worlds. I quite admit that in many minds this has been the tendency. Almost any discovery, giving a new hint as to infinitude, launches a number of inferior but vigorous brains into new lines of reasoning. We then get great multiplication of secondary volumes, which supply minced Aristotle or chaff to represent any amount of sausage-meat required by the reading public. Of course the further you can see by the telescope the further you put heaven away from the earth-dweller, and he loves it the less; for it is the near things we love, and not the remote. The heart is not universal, and cannot be stretched to it. I look upon the telescope, to an ordinary man, as a drain-pipe, through which he can run off and lose the moisture of his soul and live the worse for it afterwards; to the multitude of men, useless; to the scientific man, a means of inflation and puffing up; and to the really serious and isolated thinker, as the threshold of infinitude that may, though it has hardly yet done so, answer a few out of the ten million astral riddles sown in space. The last-named individual alone may benefit a little by it. But I question if anything at all of this was present to Nostradamus.

He seems to me, in these two closely interlinked quatrains, to enlarge much upon the theme of St. Paul (Rom. i. 28) that, as at the French Revolution, “they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind;” or one void of judgment, “to do things which are not convenient.” So that the earth gave out deceptive voices to them, and false lights for Divine light, to slay women and desecrate the temples; and then that the very stars visible to the eye, which should teach faith to all, will for these reasons veil themselves and leave nothing to mankind but the darkness of night. Pure materialism follows, God and His host withdraw, and prayer is no more heard upon the earth.

_Century I.—Quatrain 60._ [I. 168.]

Un empereur naistra près d’Italie,
Qui à l’Empire sera vendu bien cher:
Diront avec quels gens il se ralie,
Qu’on trouvera moins prince que boucher.

_Translation._

An emperor shall be born near Italy,
Bought by the Empire at a bankrupt rate:
You’d say the herd, he gathers to himself.
Denote him butcher rather than a prince.

An emperor shall be born in Corsica—Napoléon Bonaparte.
His advent to the throne of France will prove prodigiously
costly to her. It is enough to make one say, from the tribe
he surrounds himself with, that he is more like a butcher
far, with the steel dangling at his side, and slaughterman
apprentices, than a prince.

It is natural that Bouys, who has hunted Nostradamus for quatrains that will serve for adulation of Napoleon, has passed this over, _sub silentio_, entirely. Garencières, speaking of this, says it is a prophecy for the future, for that until now (1672) no such emperor has been heard of, born near Italy, that cost so much and proved a butcher.

_Century VI.—Quatrain 23._ [I. 169.]

D’esprit de regne munismes[232] descriés,
Et seront peuples esmeus contre leur Roy:
Paix, sainct nouveau, sainctes loix empirées,
Rapis[233] onc[234] fut en si trèsdur arroy.[235]

_Translation._

The rampart of tradition battered down,
The people rise against their King anoint’:
Peace, a new Saint, and sacred laws made worse,
Paris was never in such disarray.

The traditions of the French monarchy are thrown to the ground and the people rise against the King, Louis XVI. Peace will succeed the anarchy when Napoleon comes to power. Pius VII., to flatter the Emperor, will interpolate the ritual on the 15th of August with a new saint, the fête of St. Napoleon,[236] who was martyred under Diocletian. The Emperor’s interference will hurt the Church greatly, and foreign armies (1814-1815) will reduce Paris to extremities she has never before undergone.

As to the fête of St. Napoleon, the story runs that when it was first instituted its impropriety, if not blasphemy, was much discussed in Catholic circles. An Irish priest from Rome was one day communicating the strange fact at a dinner-table in Dublin, when an Irish gentleman exclaimed with vehemence, “What d—d impudence!” “No, no!” said the priest, “what you mean to call it is the Blessed Assumption,” for that day falls on the 15th of August.

_Century I.—Quatrain 31._ [I. 170.]

Tant[237] d’ans en Gaule les guerres dureront,
Outre[238] la course du Castulon[239] monarque:
Victoire incerte[240] trois grands couronneront,
Aigle, Coq-lune, Lyon-soleil en marque.

_Translation._

War draws her length in Gaul for many a day,
Beyond the course of Castula the Queen;
Uncertain victory will crown three thrones,
The Eagle, Cock-moon, Lion-sun, on coin.

Civil war and foreign will last in France long after the ephemeral Republic has perished. Victory, always uncertain, will crown three houses in succession. They will coin money with the Imperial eagle of Napoleon; the revolutionary Gallic cock appearing with the house of Orleans, instituted by revolution, and adding the crescent of Mahomet for successes in Algeria; whilst the Lion represents Louis XVIII. and Charles X. of the Capetian Monarchy, with the sun representing Catholicism. Le Pelletier says the _Sun_ symbolises Christianity, and the moon Mahomet or Antichrist. Myself I think it would be best to consider the _sun_ as the symbol of Christ; the _moon_ as the symbol of atheistic democracy or Antichrist.

This Garencières thought to be interpretable in his time. He reads the second line,

“Outre la course du Castulon monarque,”

as, after the death of the King of Spain a Castilian monarch. The eagle as Charles V. [a further analogy with Napoleon], Henry II., contemporary with Nostradamus, and Soliman, which three crowns met under Leo with uncertain odds in war.

The quatrain that follows this is:

_Century I.—Quatrain 32._

Le grand Empire sera tost translaté,
En lieu petit qui bientost viendra croistre,
Lieu bien infime d’exigue comté,
Où au milieu viendra poser son sceptre.

_Translation._

The great Empire will soon be translated into a little place
that quickly will expand. An unworthy spot, a mere county, from
the midst of which he will come to lay aside his sceptre.

Garencières interprets this of Charles V., who, three years before his death, resigned Spain and the Low Countries to Philip II., his son, and the empire to his brother Ferdinand. He then shut himself up in the Escurial, in Castile, a monastery; which the son afterwards enlarged into a grand palace, accounted by Spaniards as the eighth wonder of the world. But I am not aware that any one has yet pointed out that it fits Napoleon as patly just as it can Charles. His empire was cramped into Elba—Æthalia, the soot island (_lieu bien infime_); a mere countship was his monarchy there. It soon grew again into an empire, but he only came out of its midst to resign his sceptre a second time and for ever.

After these prelusory flourishes relating to the Vulgar Advent and French Revolution, we are now to enter upon a more special theme; the murder of the King, and the ragged beggars’ festival and brawl, called the First Republic of the Sans Culottes.

LOUIS XVI.

We enter now upon the lamentable period comprised in the reign of Louis XVI.—a period whose only parallel in history is the false and illegal trial of Charles I. of England; the perfectibility of man being evinced only by the increased savagery and augmented moral turpitude exhibited at the later period. The first quatrain that has been adduced as pertaining to this period in the Centuries of Nostradamus is that of:

_Century I.—Quatrain 57._ [I. 173.]

Par[241] grand discord la terre[242] tremblera,
Accord rompu dressant la teste au ciel,
Bouche sanglante dans le sang nagera,
Au sol la face ointe de laict et miel.

_Translation._

By reason of great discord the earth shall quake.
Revolt destroys the old order and lifts its head to heaven.
The [King’s] mouth will swim in its own blood,
And his front, anointed with milk and honey, roll upon the sod.

Tremblement de terre is earthquake, and from the time of Virgil, and much earlier than that, has been always taken to forebode convulsions of the State; disturbance of all things rooted and firm, and typifying upheavals of the populace. That it is the King’s mouth shall swim in blood is shown unmistakably by the fourth line that follows, where the face is said to be anointed with the milk and honey of the holy ampulla. The Kings of France were crowned at Reims with the oil that was kept there in _la sainte ampoule_ for this purpose. The milk and honey is merely a figurative expression; oil and wine, milk and honey, equally represent the fatness of the land.

Upon this quatrain, about the meaning of which he manifestly could know nothing, Garencières naïvely says: “The words and sense are plain, and I cannot believe there is any great mystery hidden under these words.” Words put a slight upon men’s minds to think they understand what they see written; from this it is clear that you may understand the words, and yet comprehend nothing from understanding them. Orators please take note.

_Century III.—Quatrain 59._ [Bouys, 55.]

Barbare empire par le tiers usurpé.
La plus grand part de son sang mettra à mort.
Par mort sénile par lui le quart frappé;
De peur que sang par le sang ne soit mort.

_Translation._

The rude empire is usurped by the third estate (tiers état).
It will put to death the greatest part of his [the Royal] family.
A quarter [of the kingdom] is struck with senile death;
For fear of retribution of death, from children of those murdered.

This must relate to 1789, as in no country but in France had the third estate usurped exclusive power to itself. Since that period the House of Commons in England has pursued the same lines, in a more covert, gradual, and, as some would say, lawful manner. In the Lyons edition, 1558, the second line reads _mettra à mort_, which makes better sense, though it spoils the rhythm, unless the _a_ in _mettra_ may suffer elision in old French prosody—a question I lack knowledge to determine. The quarter being destroyed, as old age withers a man, is to be understood analogically of the lives of citizens removed by terror, or emigration, or spoilation of property, or revolutionary taxation, or by imprisonment.

Bouys tells us that _sang_ is to be understood in Nostradamus of children, family, relatives, so that _que sang par le sang_ here would mean, lest the families of the injured should rise against the assassins of their flesh and blood. Such a reaction actually took place in the South, in spite of all the truculent precautions taken. The quatrains exhibit no kind of method or chronological order in their arrangement. So that, out of the thousand and more that exist of them, the commentator must hunt at large until he comes upon something salient that enables him to attach the passage to some event, when often he will be led to the most extraordinary results. The usurpation by the _tiers état_ here, with all but the very phrase supplied, and with the results that would follow from the usurpation so unmistakably set forth, fixes the pertinency of the quatrain almost as perfectly as if it had been headed _French Revolution_. Yet a reader of less observance and care than is requisite to stay the attention which leads to discovery, might readily pass it over as jargon and mere nonsense. But, once you have deciphered the quaint phrases and their connection, you cannot doubt the meaning, nor the author’s vivid gift of expression in conveying ideas, with a terseness more than Tacitean, if less artistic. You discover that Nostradamus can hint in a phrase of three words what would require a long paragraph to make it explicit in an ordinary way. This is truly the language of prophecy. It becomes legible in the light of the event it prefigures, as characters written in milk upon paper become visible at the fire, or when placed in the hot light of the sun.

_Century I.—Quatrain 36._ [_Bouys, 56._]

Tard le monarque se viendra repentir,
De n’avoir mis à mort son adversaire;
Mais viendra bien à plus haut consentir,
(à ce) Que tout son sang par mort fera défaire.

_Translation._

The monarch shall too late repent
That he hath not put to death his adversary;
But he will have to permit later on,
That all his family shall suffer for it by death.

Taking this to be the meaning, it is clear that the adversary is the Duke of Orleans,—that centre of all plotting and intrigue against Louis,—who had so forgotten himself as, at a public bed of justice, in 1788, to shake his fist in the King’s face with a most threatening expression of countenance. For this he was only sent into exile when he ought to have suffered death. In the last line _sang_ again stands for family and relatives. This could scarcely be plainer if the names were given; but, had Nostradamus here deviated from the secret idiom of prophetic language, he would have prevented the accomplishment of what he was asserting. Things like this may be happened on by chance, if you choose to say so, but the theory reels under the constant repetition of such chances. Men whose names are prominently before the world can hardly be introduced into prophecy. But we shall see shortly that Nostradamus is able to assign names with precision where the individuals are of a lesser rank, and that their names may so pass unobserved until history has recorded them with her iron pen.

_Century IX.—Quatrain 20. (June 20, 1791.)_ [I. 174.]

De nuict viendra par le forest de Reines,
Deux pars, vaultorte, Herne la pierre blanche,
Le moyne noir en gris dedans Varennes:
Esleu Cap. cause tempeste, feu, sang, tranche.

_Translation._ [II. P., I. 174.]

By night shall come through the forest of Reines
Two parts, face about, the Queen a white stone,
The black monk in gray within Varennes.
Chosen Cap. causes tempest, fire, blood, slice.

In the translation of this, Garencières leaves the two words _vaultorte Herne_ as in the original French, and does not attempt the translation. He also mistakes Reines for Rennes, the chief town in Little Brittany. He evidently has no conception whatever of the meaning of the quatrain. Bouys and Le Pelletier differ on minor points in rendering these words. _Forest_, Le Pelletier reads, in Latin, as _fores_, gate, that is, by the Queen’s gate, and he quotes Thiers to show (“Hist. Révol. Fran.” i. 309) that the Queen made sure of a secret gate out of the Tuileries, by which they escaped. But Bouys takes it for the forest of Reines, which is on the road to Varennes. _Deux pars_ is husband and wife; _voltorte_, or _vaultorte_, is a cross-road, or a divergent road; _vaulx_, a valley, and _torte_, tortuous, says Le Pelletier. One does not quite see how to educe cross road from this. Roquefort gives _volt_ for face, and _torte_ would be turned, which seems to me more likely. However, it stands for the road through St. Menehould, on the way to Montmédi. This, it seems, they were forced into by posting arrangements. Prudhomme (“Revol. de Paris,” No. 102, p. 542) sets the divergence down to vacillation or change of orders. If that be the correct statement, then my etymology of _face about_ for _vaultorte_ fits it best. _Herne_ is _Reine_, by metaplasm of _h_ for _i_. It was permissible in anagrammatic writing to change one letter in a word, but not more than one. The reader can refer for this to the “Dictionnaire de Trévoux,” under _Anagramme_. The white stone stands for this royal or precious stone, the Queen, who was dressed in white. The King was dressed in grey. Prudhomme, in the work mentioned above (p. 554), says he wore a round hat, which hid his face, and had on an iron-grey coat (_gris de fer_), so he appeared like a Carmelite.

There are nearly fourteen octavo pages of small print (p. 411) of De Bouillé, which it might be well to print, called “Détails du voyage du roi et de la reine à Montmédy et leur arrestation à Varennes dans le Clairmontais, le 22 juin, 1791,” full of interesting particulars.

VAULTORTE.

“Mais on verra que les circonstances changèrent entièrement
jusqu’au moment de l’exécution de son projet; et ce qui était
possible au mois de janvier 1791, ne l’était plus au mois de
juin.”—“Mémoires du Marquis de Bouillé,” p. 195, ed. 1821.

“Il [le roi] m’informait qu’il partirait, avec sa famille, dans
une seule voiture qu’il ferait faire exprès. Dans la réponse
que je fis au roi, je pris la liberté de lui représenter
encore une fois que la route par Varennes offrait de grands
inconvéniens, à cause des relais qu’il fallait y placer pour
suppléer à la poste.... J’engageai donc Sa Majesté à prendre la
route par Reims, ou celle de Flandre, en passant par Chimay, et
en traversant ensuite les Ardennes pour se rendre à Montmédy.
Je lui représentait les inconveniens de voyager avec la reine
et ses enfants, dans une seule voiture _faite exprès_, et qui
serait remarquée de tout le monde,” etc.—“Mémoires du Marquis
de Bouillé,” p. 217.

This flight occurred on June 20, 1791. On the following day the National Assembly suspended Louis XVI. from his functions. On the 1st of September they passed another decree, that should the King surrender to the will of the people and become a Constitutional King he might do so. This he duly signed and attested on the 14th of the same month; so _Capet fut esleu_. The title of King of the French, instead of the King of France, had been established since October 16, 1789 (“Cyclopædia of Universal History”), which virtually was the same thing. But yet strictly it was not until after the flight that he became _Esleu Cap_. Madame Campan, in the “Mémoires de Marie-Antoinette,” ii. 150, relates that the Queen’s hair had become white in a single night and she had had a lock of her white hair mounted in a ring for the Princesse de Lamballe, inscribed _Blanchis par le malheur_. She had become _la pierre plus blanche encore_. Her dress was white, and her complexion too. The _tranche_ stands for the slice, or _couperet_, of the guillotine. Bouys was amongst the first to explain this quatrain in print, and he says he owed the explanation to M. de Vaudreuil, of Nevers, who has written upon Nostradamus.

_Century IX.—Quatrain 34._ [I. 177.]

Le part[243] solus,[244] mary[245] sera mitré
Retour: conflict passera sur le thuille,
Par cinq cents: un trahyr[246] sera[247] tittré[248]
Narbon: et Saulce par coutaux avons d’huille.

_Translation._

The husband alone afflicted will be mitred on his return. A
conflict will take place at the Tuileries by five hundred men.
One traitor will be titled—Narbon; and (the other) Saulce,
grandfather oilman, will [hand him] over to the soldiery.

The harness broke at Montmirail, and detained them two hours (p. 247). The King showed himself at Chalons, and was recognized by the postmaster, who held his tongue. Everything went wrong owing to the change of date and loss of time on the road. At St. Menehould he was recognized again, and Drouet the postmaster’s son, rode on to Varennes to betray him.

On the 15th of June the Marquis de Bouillé received a letter from the King, saying his departure would be delayed till the 20th, at midnight; that he could not take the Marquis d’Agoult, recommended to him by Bouillé (as an “homme d’esprit, ferme et courageux, qui peut se montrer si les circonstances l’exigaient,” p. 217), because Madame de Tourzel, the governess of the children, insisted on her right of place never to quit them; and this consideration carried the decision. As if the King could not have let them follow in another vehicle! Anything rather than be forced to show himself on the road as he did (p. 256).

How it all miscarried will be best understood by reading the whole of De Bouillé’s account. His arrangements seem to have been masterly, like the noble soldier and statesman that he was; the King’s arrangements vacillating, foolish, and even perverse. In this account Monsieur Saulce is not seen at all.

This is to be filled in as follows. Louis XVI. alone, without his wife, will suffer the disgrace of being crowned with the red cap of Liberty, called the Phrygian bonnet or mitre, from its being the head-dress of the priests of Mithras. The five hundred Marseillais led the attack upon the Tuileries, a palace begun by Catherine de Medici (1564) on the site of the tile-kilns (_le thuille_), and not in existence when Nostradamus wrote this (1555). The Count de Narbonne, Minister of War, was of the noblesse, and Saulce, father, son, and grandson, were chandlers and grocers, or oilmen, of Varennes. The father was _Procureur-syndic_ of his commune. These oilmen betrayed him to the populace, and he was arrested _per custodes_. These sneaks stand as typical or representative traitors of the two classes of _noblesse_ and _bourgoisie_ paying cowardly court to the _prolétaire_ class.

The Madame Campan before alluded to (ii. 158) relates that their Majesties alighted at the grocery shop of the Mayor of Varennes, Saulce; and he could have saved the King. The Queen was seated in the shop between two high-piled stacks of candles, and was talking to Madame Saulce.

The _Gazette Nationale_, June 25, 1791, reporting what took place in the Assembly the night before, announces that M. Martinet, in addressing the House, described Saulce’s conduct as wise and _heroic_, replying as he did to the promises and caresses of the King and Queen, “J’aime mon roi; mais je resterai fidèle à ma patrie.” The result of his heroism was that two months later on the Assembly voted him twenty thousand livres as the reward of his exalted _vertue citoyenne_. Whether, in the scramble that so soon followed, he ever received the wasteful and ridiculous Judas-gift there is nothing to show; but the bulletin recording the vote of these new-fledged statesmen, liberal of money not their own, still exists. We have here “_un Brute Français_,” apeing the Roman, who loved Cæsar well, but blood better.

Thiers’ account of the attack upon the Tuileries, June 20, 1792 (“Révol. Fran.,” ii. 152), furnishes a pathetic picture of the afflicted King (_marri mitré_) of the red nightcap, in which he was day-dreaming. The palace was evacuated at about seven in the evening by the populace, which had effected its entry by main force; but, when the crowd had now withdrawn peaceably and in good order, the King, Queen, his sister, and the children, all met together, shedding a torrent of tears. The King seemed stunned by what had taken place; the red cap was still upon his head; he now, for the first time for several hours, noticed it, and flung it aside with indignation.

As to the five hundred men named by our oracle, the historian of the French Revolution again comes to our aid (ii. p. 209), saying that Barbaroux had promised the Jacobins the co-operation of his Marseillais, who were on the way to Paris. The project was to assemble at the Tuileries and depose the king (ii. p. 235). They arrived on June 30, 1792, and were five hundred men. Ils étaient _cinq cents_.

Those who care to see how Narbonne acted against the King, can refer to the “Histoire de la Révolution,” by Bertrand de Molleville, for satisfaction.

This stands out certainly as one of the most startling of all the thousand quatrains of our strange seer. It will henceforth and to the end of time speak for itself without comment, if we merely enumerate the historic facts as here anticipated in four lines. The horror of the king at finding himself _mitré_. The god Mithras is depicted on coins in this very cap, and his priests made it their head-dress; further, it furnishes the lively etymology of the word _mitre_ itself. It was for ages, before the French took it up, the received emblem of that frantic crime that has been called _Liberty_. I will not say the result of this is, as poetry, artistically beautiful; but, as a phrase of intense expression, it is so terse that at a stroke, beyond that of hydraulic power, it seems able to compress a truss of hay so as it may lie in a husk of beech-mast. I do say, nevertheless, that, thus regarded, Dante and Shakespeare can hardly furnish between them three sentences of such compressed force; the matter in it seems to be condensed to adamant. _Mari sera mitré_, as it has been just explained, will be found, the more profoundly it is thought upon, to be an original miracle in phraseology. It is an actual and an awful prophecy in itself, but to devise a phrase to so convey the idea by human speech to the human mind of another is miraculous. It may sleep for centuries, as this has done, for lack of interpretation; but, when duly interpreted it cannot be resisted; it storms the understanding; and, as a phrase, seems to be a miracle begotten expressly to become the vehicle in which to convey another miracle. This horror of the King mitred is one distinct forecast. The second point is his return to Paris. There is, thirdly, the conflict of the five hundred. Fourthly, the spot, the Tuileries,—at Nostradamus’ time, a thing of thin air, where the tiles were still baking, fire-hot to roof houses with, whilst the pen was writing this. Here again, if it is not poetry, it performs the poet’s function, which gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. Fifthly, comes a titled name—Narbonne. Sixthly, that of Saulce; and finally, the handing over to the custodians. Here are seven distinct prophecies of events historical: two of them, names of men yet to be born at a period two hundred years removed. And, behold, these seven facts are put before you in four lines!

There is a point of particular interest to be noted in that first line. Bouys (p. 62) remarks that, first line though it be, it should be the last, as the mitre was the closing act of the entire drama; and he supposes that Nostradamus wanted to make the treachery most prominent to the mind of the reader. That is to talk like a chronologer. The first cause and the final are, in spiritual matters, one. The life and death of man are reduced to two points, and epitaphs give enough about most of the lives of mortal men when they chronicle the birth and death dates. “Alone he returned and was mitred.” How, step by step, it all came about, _follows_ necessarily; and that is how Nostradamus puts it to us. If he had weighted himself with what science calls method, he would have destroyed his own instinct; as science does, just as Saturn ate up the offspring of his proper loins. The soul that does this must grope to its results, but can never jump to them by prophecy.

Before we go to the next quatrain it may be instructive to note Garencières’ treatment of the pregnant forecast we have just traversed. He translates thus:

“The separated husband shall wear a mitre,
Returning, battle, he shall go over the tyle,
By five hundred one dignified shall be betrayed,
Narbon and Salces shall have oil by the quintal.”

“The verse signifieth, that some certain man who was married shall be parted from his wife, and shall attain to some great ecclesiastical dignity. The second verse is that, coming back from some place or enterprise, he shall be met and fought with, and compelled to escape over the tiles of a house. The third verse is that a man of great account shall be betrayed by five hundred of his men. And the last that, when these things shall come to pass, Narbon and Salces, which are two cities of Languedoc, shall reap and make a great deal of oil.”

This shows some skill, but what an unintelligible total we reach. I merely set it down to prove to the sceptical, and those who incline to class Nostradamus authoritatively amongst impostors whose jargon is not worth the pains of interpreting, that they may look at this and learn from it two facts: First, that before the event forecast has happened, all the keys of interpretation are wanting, the prophecy looks like jargon, and is so for all practical purposes; but that, secondly, once it has happened, or as we may say kissed sunlight, the keys appear with it, the light and the understanding awaken together. There is light in potence or _in posse_ now; but even then they will not unlock secrets, if the keys remain in the hands of ignorant or scientific persons [or self-sufficient, which is nearly the same thing as scientific], or in the hands of romance-readers and lazy dullards. You will not unravel “the words of the wise and their dark sayings” by reading a quatrain once through. The interpreter must approach the work in a simple, unprejudiced manner; he must get light from history how he can,—from memoirs, letters, books,—and learn by the success and failure of past commentators. He must be content to work very hard all the while, and with little encouragement from others; and then at last he may so do something, that even his neighbours may allow his work to be,—according to the bent or water-pent of the particular mind of each,—some a discovery, some a revelation. He himself may probably feel that a supreme patience has had more to do with bringing the thing to pass than any other faculty that could easily be named. Things of the spirit must, of course, be spiritually discerned, and all talk about faculties when the individual soul is treated of must sound a little paradoxical. To divide the unique and indivisible unity of the soul into parts and pieces, betrays in the proposer himself perhaps some “want of parts.” But from the earliest time until now, this has been the scientific way of treating the human understanding; so let us consider that it is right enough. The soul has almost always been cut into three, and then left to wriggle and wriggle, and at last to join itself together again, as best it can, like a worm in a garden. If this be according to Aristotle, let all Sorbonne profess it for right. What does it matter how we treat _one_ thing, if only our method be perfectly scientific and in accordance with all the rest of the universal phenomena, and with a right interpretation of nature? What can it matter about the invisible, if only our eyes know how to take account of the things that are seen; that is, of the only things truly subject to the cognizance of man?

_Century IX.—Quatrain 92._ [Bouys, 64.]

Le roi voudra en cité neufue entrer.
Par ennemis expugner l’on viendra.
Captif libère faux dire et perpétrer,
Roi dehors estre, loin d’ennemis tiendra.

_Translation._

The King would enter into the city.
(By enemies expelled, France will obtain it [or] they will arrive
there;)
It will be false to say and reiterate that the captive is free,
[And] that the King who is out [of Paris] will keep aloof from
enemies.

M. le Pelletier does not touch this quatrain. M. Bouys gives his interpretation, which is not very convincing, and I thought of passing it by altogether. But the _captif libère_ so links it with the journey to Varennes of the Royal family, that it seemed preferable to include it, and leave it to the reader to reject or accept it, as he might think fit. Another determining influence was from my noticing that the _cité neuve_, or Montmédi, which the King desired to reach, was not French when the quatrain was penned. The VIII., IX., and X. Centuries were not published with the first seven, but were issued at Lyons from the same press, namely that of Pierre Rigaud. Moreri states that Nostradamus felt encouraged by the reception accorded to the seven Centuries to publish three more (_i.e._ VIII, IX., and X.), in 1558. There is a copy now in the Bibliothèque Royale, to which the authorities give the date of 1558. Pierre Rigaud’s name appears on the title, but no date, which is remarkable, as the first volume of 1555 has this imprint: “_Ce present livre a été achevé d’imprimer le IIIIᵉ jour de may MDLV_,” giving a date as if for a nativity. M. le Pelletier demurs to the accuracy of the pretended date, and thinks it must belong to the edition of 1566, by Pierre Rigaud. If so, these three Centuries scarcely appeared in the lifetime of Nostradamus, though they are dedicated to his patron, Henry II.,—who died in 1559,—in an elaborate and interesting epistle dedicatory. In opening this, Nostradamus says he has long been in doubt as to whom he should devote (_consacrer_) these three Centuries, but at last took courage to lay it at the feet of royalty. Now, the edition of 1566 particularly states that the prophecies _n’ont encore jamais esté imprimées_. One cannot read the Dedicatory Epistle without feeling sure it was written for the eye of the King, and therefore at least as early as 1558, but probably earlier by a year or two. I therefore assume that he presented them to the King in a fair manuscript, and that having done that he remained content, and that the family at his death, finding the original manuscript, put it in Rigaud’s hands to be printed.

My reason for thus inquiring into the dates is this: that the investigation makes it extremely likely the above quatrain was written before 1557, the year in which Montmédi was taken by France, and, if so, it explains the line that I have thrown into a parenthesis in a manner in which it has never been interpreted before. _Expugner_ is not French now; _expugnable_ is all that now remains of it in the language. So that

Par ennemis expugner l’on viendra

may, I think, be regarded as a parenthetic explanation referring to the _cité neuve_, which was not yet French territory, though on the point of becoming so,—_l’on viendra par ennemies expugner_, by expulsion of the enemy, in 1557. If this rendering be thought valid, it furnishes one reason the more for explaining this quatrain as one of the series belonging to the Revolutionary epoch, and one more redeemed from the maze of Nostradamus.

It would appear from Bouys, though he does not produce his historical authorities, that immediately the King escaped, France was flooded with announcements that the captive was free, and had their consent to hold himself aloof—_loin d’ennemis tiendra_. If this be established, it becomes certain that we can in the main determine this quatrain accurately. (“Histoire de la Révolution, par deux amis de la Liberté,” in 7 vols., vol. vii. p. 126.)

_Century VIII.—Quatrain 87._ [I. 179.]

Mort conspirée viendra en plein effect,
Charge donnée et voyage de mort:
Esleu, créé, receu par siens, deffait.
Sang d’innocent devant soy par[249] remort.

_Translation._

Death hatched by treason will take its full effect,
A charge imposed, voyage made to death.
Elected, created, received by his own, and undone by them.
The blood of Innocency (rises) before them in remorse (eternal).

Bouys thinks by the last line Nostradamus intended to convey, that the King felt poignant grief at the innocent victims his overthrow would leave without protection to the tender mercies of the States-General. The other is better, connecting it, as it does, with that case analogous, where the mob cursed themselves out of their own mouth, and said “His blood be upon us, and on our children” (Matt. xxvii. 25).

_Century X.—Quatrain 43._ [I. 180.]

Le trop bon temps,[250] trop de bonté royale,
Fais et deffais, prompt, subit, negligence,
Legier[251] croira faux d’espouse loyalle,
Luy mis à mort par[252] sa benevolence.

_Translation._

Too much of good fortune, a too lax Royalty,
That makes and unmakes [appointments] sudden, hasty, negligent;
Lightly believes his loyal Consort false,
And bids good nature lead the way to death.

This is a picture to the life of the fat-making King Louis Seize. The brush of a Velasquez, as it cannot paint the moral, could hardly so well place him before the eye, as in life. He is no picture well-framed, hanging for inspection in a gallery of pictures, but flesh and blood like one’s self alive, and moving with us in the gallery a spectator and observer like ourselves. We have here Louis XVI. before us in the flesh.

“_He makes and unmakes appointments_; yes, indeed.” In a little more than eighteen years, sixty-seven ministers take office and relinquish it. Here they are alphabetically, as Bouys enumerates them. Amelot, Barentin, Bertrand de Molleville, Boyne, Breteuil, Brieune, Brogli, Beaulieu, Cahier de Gerville, Calonne, Castries, Champion de Cicé, Clavières, Chambonas, Clugny, Dabancourt, Danton, de Grave, Delessart, de Crosne, de Joly, d’Ormesson, Dabouchage, Dumourier, Duportail, Duport-Dutertre, Duranton, Foulon, Fourgueux, Fleurierès, Joly de Flemy, Lacoste, la Galaisières, Lailliac, la Jarre, la Luzerne, Lamoignon, Lambert, Laporte, Latour-Dupin, Lenoir, Liancourt, Leroux, Malesherbes, Maurepas, Miromeuil, Montmorin, Montbarrey, Mourgues, Narbonne, Necker, Pastoret, Puységur, Roland, Sartines, Ségur, Servan, Saint-Germain, Saint-Priest, Sainte-Croix, Taboureau, Tarbé, Terrier-Monceil, Thevenard, Turgot, Vergennes, Villedeuil. Several of these served twice, and Necker was in three times; so that the number of ministries in the time mentioned is seventy-two—a thing not to be paralleled in history as a course of doing and undoing, of _fais and deffais_.

His temper was ungovernable and sudden, extending even to rough bathos, but was soon over. Maurepas always said, you must let the King have his first fling of humour out, and then he will soon recover. Secondly, his negligence let everything drift, finance included, till ruin brought collapse. You might think his economists had drawn their singular axiom for statesmanship, _Laissez faire_, from the example of their royal master. He fell at once into the intrigue of the diamond necklace belonging to Marie Antoinette, which was conveyed by the Countess of La Motte to the Cardinal de Rohan. Report runs that he even placed his wife under arrest in her own chamber for several days. “Lui mis à mort par sa bénévolence” displays a most wonderful forecast, and it is open to read it now LOUIS _mis à mort_.

_Century VI.—Quatrain 92._ [I. 182.]

Prince de beauté tant[253] venuste,[254]
Au chef menée, le second faict,[255] trahy.
La cité au glaive de poudre face[256] aduste,[257]
Par trop grand meurtre la chef[258] du Roi hay.

_Translation._

The prince of very comely beauty (shall be)
Led to the head, and then betrayed to a second (place).
The city of the sword, with powder-torch, burns
The head of the King, hated on account of his illegal murder.