Hear now the story of the man in this book.

He was born Michel de Nostredame, in December of 1503, in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence — a small town in the south of France, among the olive groves and the old Roman stones. His father was a notary, a keeper of records and contracts. The healing blood came from his mother's side — her grandfather had been a physician — and it was healing that claimed the boy first.

At Avignon the plague shut the university doors and sent him home. At Montpellier he entered to study medicine — and was thrown out, because he had worked with his hands as an apothecary, mixing remedies, and the university forbade a doctor any manual trade. So he learned the healer's art the hard way: on the road. For years he walked France wherever the plague was burning, and he became famous for it — famous for his rose pill, and for telling towns to clean their streets and bury their dead, when other doctors were still reaching for the lancet.

The plague took his payment. In 1534 it took his wife and his two children. He walked away from Agen a widower, and he kept walking — through France, through Italy, fighting the sickness in Marseille and in Aix beside the physician Louis Serre — until in 1547 he settled in Salon-de-Provence, in the house that stands there to this day, and married again, and raised six children.

And there, in his late forties, the doctor turned his face to the stars.

In 1550 he published an almanac under a new name — his own, dressed in Latin: Nostradamus. It sold. The nobles began to write to him for horoscopes. And in 1555, in Lyon, came the book this one is built from: Les Prophéties — The Prophecies.

Now hear what kind of prophesying his was, for it was like no other's.

He did not preach, and he did not rant. He wrote quatrains — verses of four lines — and he gathered them into Centuries: ten books of one hundred verses each, nine hundred and forty-two of which survive. In his letter to his son César, printed at the front of the book, he says plainly why they are hard to read: he veiled them on purpose — French twisted with Latin, Greek, Italian and Provençal, names broken into anagrams, no dates pinned down — so that the meaning would stay sealed until the event itself came to unlock it. In his letter to King Henry the Second, he sets the reach of the prophecies: from his own century forward, to the year 3797.

He read the heavens the way he had read a sick man's face — by the quality of the hour, the turning of the great wheels of the planets — what the learned then called judicial astrology. Kings and plagues, fires and floods, the rise and fall of empires: all of it folded into four lines at a time, and left for the future to open.

Fame walked him to Paris. Queen Catherine de' Medici, who had read his almanac and its warnings to the royal house, summoned him to explain himself — and kept him. He ended as counselor and physician-in-ordinary to her son, King Charles the Ninth. And when King Henry died of a lance through the visor in a tournament in 1559, men opened the Prophecies and found the young lion and the old, and have been opening the book after every great event ever since. Over two hundred editions have been printed since his death. The book has never gone silent.

On the evening of the first of July, 1566, in Salon, gout-worn and swelling with dropsy, he told his secretary: "You will not find me alive at sunrise." At sunrise they found him by his bed and his bench — as he had written of himself. He lies in the church of Saint-Laurent in Salon to this day.

That is the man. A doctor of plagues who became a prophet of centuries. And now — in this book — his own words stand exactly as he left them. Open the Centuries, and let the verses speak.