The Master of All Desires by Judith Merkle Riley

Author:Judith Merkle Riley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Monsieur:

This Saturday, the 29th of November, 1561, I received your letters sent from Paris on the 12th of October of this year. And it seems to me that your letters are full of spleen, quarrel, and indignation that you have against me for I know not what reason. You complain that when I was in Paris paying reverence to Her Majesty the Queen you lent me two rose nobles and twelve crowns, which is right and true…As for writing me that I left Paris ungrateful for your hospitality…it is totally outside my nature. As for my fine reward I had from the court, when I got sick, His Majesty the King sent me a hundred crowns. The queen sent me thirty, and that’s the lovely sum I got for having come two hundred leagues and spent a hundred crowns—thirty crowns. But that’s not the point: after I returned to Paris from Saint-Germain, an honorable great lady whom I did not know came to see me…and told me that the Gentlemen of the Justice of Paris were coming to interrogate me about what methods I used to make my predictions. I said…that they needn’t bother, that I planned to return to Provence the next morning, and I did…But you’ll think that with all these words that I write that I intend to put you off without paying. Not so. I send you in this letter two little notes, which, if it pleases you to deliver them, I am sure that your money will be repaid promptly…

Excerpts from a Letter of Nostradamus to Jean Morel

Fonds latin No. 8589, French National Library

Another cushion, Léon, before I perish of the Cardinal’s luxury.” Having returned to Paris from his trip to Blois, Nostradamus had settled himself into the overwhelmingly large, dark, carved wooden chair, entirely devoid of comfort, which was provided in his room in the Cardinal de Bourbon’s palatial establishment. Nostradamus’s days as a houseguest were beginning to pall; the food and company were excellent, but the open, high-ceilinged stone rooms, so chill and drafty, the constant annoyance of strange servants, the busy carved faces of grotesques and beasts that peered at him from every piece of malignant, hard-edged furniture made him long for his own cozy house, his sweet-tempered wife, and the joyful sound of his own children. Then there was the matter of his books, from which long parting annoyed him, and the nattering of the ignorant, who hadn’t yet paid him enough to return his loan to the trusting Maître Morel. “Don’t let a soul in; I want to finish the dauphin’s horoscope.”

“I thought you’d finished it already,” said Léon, looking at the mass of annotated papers that lay on the lion-footed table before the large, ugly, hard-edged chair in which the old prophet sat.

“I did. This is the new, improved version. I need the queen’s fee to get home, and I see no reason to put her gratitude in jeopardy.”

“In short, you are taking out a fatal illness and substituting a period of great risk—”

“You presume upon your long service, Léon.

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