Béroalde de Verville

Born in Paris in 1556, François Béroalde de Verville was the son of the scholar and Protestant teacher Matthieu Brouard, known as Béroalde. During the French Wars of Religion, his family left France after the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and he later studied in Geneva and Basel, including medicine.

He returned to France in the early 1580s and eventually settled in Tours, where he became a canon at Saint-Gatien Cathedral. Alongside religious duties, he wrote widely across genres: novels, poems, moral and philosophical works, learned compilations, and curious hybrids that resist easy classification.

He is most often associated with Le Moyen de parvenir, a famously unruly and comic book usually dated to the early 17th century. Its mix of bawdy humor, clever talk, and intellectual play has kept him interesting to later readers as a writer who stood at the crossroads of Renaissance humanism, satire, and experimental prose.