Michel de
Nostredame--or--Nostradamus:
From the Book:
The Enchanted World of Wizards and
Witches;
In the days when Europe was plentifully
supplied with practicing wizards, there lived in France a man named Michel de
Nostredame--called Nostradamus--whose professions were medicine and astrology
and whos gift was prophecy. He accurately predicted the deaths of kings, the
fall of cities, and a host of other great events, although the verses in which
he cast the prophecies were so cryptic that many were never
deciphered.
People said that his prophecies came from
observing the stars in their courses, but his power clearly was inborn and not
the result of astrological study, as a homely tale
tells:
Once, in his physician's capacity,
Nostradamus visited a lord whos mother was ailing. As the two men conferred in
the castle courtyard, the lord spied a pair of pigs-a black one and a white-and
proposed with a smile that the physician should tell the future of the beasts.
Nostradamus promptly replied that he and the lord would eat the black one and
that a wolf would eat the white.
As a playful trick, the lord secretly
ordered that the white pig, not the black, be roasted for supper. That night, as
the two men ate, he informed Nostradamus-smacking his lips at the rare taste of
his jest-that they were eating white pig. Nostradamus denied it and the cook was
summoned to settle the argument.
She confessed to her master that they were
in fact eating the white pig. She had killed and dressed the white for cooking
as ordered, but when she left it unattended in the kitchen, a tame wolf had
gnawed it so thoroughly she was forced to roast the black pig as well, and that
was the flesh she had served.