Michel de Nostredame — known to the world as Nostradamus — spent his final years in Salon-de-Provence, famous across Europe for his "Centuries": obscure quatrains that rulers and common folk alike searched for glimpses of the future. Catherine de' Medici herself had summoned him to court and named him physician to the king.
On the evening of 1 July 1566, according to the account passed down by his secretary Jean de Chavigny, the seer spoke his last prophetic words: "You will not find me alive at sunrise." On the morning of 2 July he was found dead beside his bed, felled by the gout and dropsy that had tormented him for months.
The final prophecy
Sceptics note that a gravely ill man hardly needed the stars to foresee his own end. And yet the detail — the precision of that sentence, recorded by the man who lived at his side — keeps the legend alive. Four and a half centuries later, his quatrains are still reread at every turn of history: no prophet ever had a death so consistent with his life.