``He has been consulted throughout the ages in times of unease and crisis,'' said Jacqueline Allemand, director of the Nostradamus Museum in the southern French town, Salon-de-Provence, where he lived in the 1550s. ``And with the millennium approaching, this is such a time.'' The consultations have been given added urgency by one quatrain amid pages of doom-filled prophecies. In The Centuries, a transcription of his apocalyptic visions, Nostradamus produced 1,000 four-line verses that were sufficiently vague to allow endless interpretations. But in one of his few precise statements, he mentions the arrival fromthe sky of a ``great King of Terror'' in ``The seventh month of 1999''.

The many Nostradamus followers around the world were quick to latch on to this quatrain. ``Canadians see in this text the liberation of Quebec,'' said Allemand. ``Again the Japanese have seen a world war started by the US. The French see signs of an Islamic invasion. The truth is you can see in Nostradamus whatever you like. He could simply have been referring to the eclipse of the sun on August 11, which it may have been possible to foresee.''

She dismisses as ``absurd'' the authors who say they know what form the terror will take. These include designer Paco Rabanne, who says the Mir will crash on to France on August 11, exploding in Paris and in the rural Gers County in the south west. ``In truth his message is too well concealed for us to predict the future using it,'' said Allemand. At the museum, which is based in the house where Nostradamus lived and worked, she is trying to restore his image. ``There have been so manycharlatans who have exploited his books that people have come to think of him as a charlatan as well. That is wrong. He was a great man.''

Born in Provence in 1503, Nostradamus studied medicine and became known as one of the few local doctors prepared to treat victims of the plague. Astrology was part of his trade, with 16th-century medical opinion believing that illness arrived when the human body and the planets fell into disharmony. But Nostradamus was also a businessman who invented fast-selling beauty ointments and an even faster-selling love potion. His catastrophic vision of the future of mankind struck after the death of his first wife and two children from the plague. Some of his contemporaries criticised him as a fraud but were silenced by the death of King Henri XI, who succumbed in a way that appeared to have been foretold in The Centuries. ``I am not interested in his predictions at all,'' said Jean Louis Kamoun, director of a sound and light show, part of a Nostradamus festival. ``Whatinterests me is his courage. He was threatened by the Inquisition for allegedly attacking the Roman Catholic Church and he had to flee southern France for two years. But he still had the stomach to produce The Centuries, which could easily have cost him his life.''

--The Observer News Service