Nostradamus's Traité des fardemens et confitures, variously entitled Moult utile opuscule... and Le vrai et parfaict embellissement de la face..., was first published in 1555, even though it contained a Proem, or prologue, dated 1552. Clearly the work of an
apothecary, it contained recipes for preparing
cosmetics and
preserves, the latter based largely on
sugar, which was controlled at the time by the apothecaries' guilds.[1]
Content
Among the topics covered (which include removing spots from the face with mercury) were:
The book was translated into
German in 1574, then the German was revised in 1994, and finally the German was translated into
English under the title The Elixirs of Nostradamus (Moyer Bell, 1996). Needless to say, the fourth-hand results of this process were unreliable, if not downright dangerous: the term roses rouges incarnées, for example, was routinely translated as 'black orchids', and urines (urine) came out as 'drinking wells'.