A Pulmonary Machinery: Béroalde de Verville, Les Soupirs amoureux (1583)

Tom Conley's essay studies verbal and visual signs in the poetry of François Béroalde de Verville (1556–1626). Exhumed and printed in her Poésie amoureuse de l'âge baroque: Vingt poètes maniéristes et baroques (1990), a "collage of poems focusing on the tortures of love," Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani offers a selection of verse from Béroalde's Les Soupirs amoureux (1583), the third volume of his Les Apprehensions spirituelles, "a collection of poetry, political theory and occult philosophy." Examining in detail the first (and only) edition of Les Soupirs amoureux, Conley stresses how the volume as a whole appears not only as verse but also as a visual and physical object. He contends that the amorous sigh or "soupir" is a signifier – a plot point – integral to a serial pattern of iterations that order what otherwise would be a patchwork of sonnets, elegies, odes, and complaintes. Given that, like his mentor, Henri IV, who was known for his visual acuity, Béroalde invests his verse with an ocular or even lenticular character of the kind that perhaps he had gained from his commentaries of the copperplate illustrations in Jacques Besson's Theatrum instrumentorum (1576) and, later, his revised edition of the French translation (1546) of Francesco Colonna's richly pictured Hypnerotomachia poliphilii (1600).