Catherine de’ Medici, the predictions of Nostradamus and the circumstances of her death

In the Year When in France One Eye Shall Rule, Great Turmoil Shall Come upon the Court, the Grandee of Blois Shall Slay His Friend, and Misfortune and Doubt Shall Beset the King.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the obsession with the predictions of Nostradamus had reached such a pitch that scholars set about interpreting them in earnest. The eminent French jurist Étienne Pasquier, for instance, found in Nostradamus prophecies of the revolution of the League and of the arrest of the Duke of Guise and his subsequent execution. As for the quatrain about the eye, Pasquier likewise had an opinion of his own: he saw in the image of the eye Henry III, who had rid himself of his counsellors and dismissed even his own mother.

I do not know whether it was the Parisian scholar who alarmed the Queen Mother with this disquieting reading; most likely the old lady followed the fashionable soothsayer herself. At any rate, Catherine de' Medici was greatly agitated by the prophecy and even tried, as far as her powers allowed, to smooth over the misdeeds of her rampaging son, who in the heat of his disgrace had arrested her friend Cardinal de Bourbon too, shutting him up in Blois.

Yet her visit to the cardinal, to explain that Henry had erred in arresting him and wished to make peace, proved fatal to her. It was not even that the captive cardinal blamed Catherine herself for all the troubles that had befallen at Blois: at the end of 1588 she had gathered her friends at her house, wishing to form some sort of coalition and council, and her son had clapped them into the towers. The cardinal's accusation undermined the queen's health, though most likely the old dame simply caught a dreadful chill, hurrying out in agitation into the January cold.

In short, one way or another, Nostradamus led his ardent devotee Catherine de' Medici to the very brink of the grave. What is most characteristic in the story of this woman's death is her unshakeable faith in predictions, and the manner in which they came true for her. One of the predictions made to her, for example, said that if she wished to live long, she must beware of Saint-Germain. And the queen followed this counsel scrupulously: she did not go to Saint-Germain-en-Laye without real need, and she did not live in the Louvre, which belonged to the parish of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, but built her own palace in the parish of Saint-Eustache.

The irony of fate is that in the last days of her life the king's confessor, de Saint-Germain, turned up at the queen's bedside: Julien de Saint-Germain, the royal tutor, Bishop of Cajazzo and Abbot of Chaalis, heard the confession of the dying woman.

But that is not all. The old lady also recalled another ominous prophecy, that death would overtake her beneath the ruins of a house. What house could be meant? Why, the House of Guise, the murder of two of whose members by her son threatened, to say the least, the welfare of the dynasty.

In a word, Queen Catherine lay dying, tormented by the terrors of her horoscope. And in the end she died on 5 January, the very day on which her half-brother Alessandro de' Medici, the tyrant of Florence, had been murdered. A mystical and terrible story.