**BERNEUX, SIMÉON-FRANÇOIS.** — Born on 14 May 1814 at Château-du-Loir (France), he was ordained a priest in 1837 and entered the Paris Foreign Missions in 1839, departing for western Tonkin in 1840. Almost immediately captured, he was taken to the capital, imprisoned, tortured, and sentenced to death. He was freed in 1843, along with his four companions, through the intervention of Commander Favin-Lévêque, who wished to return them to France. From the Île Bourbon, he obtained permission to go to Macao, from where he departed for Manchuria (1844). There he became pro-vicar of the mission, which he later governed during the journey of his bishop, Monsignor Verrolles (q.v.), to France. Elected coadjutor to Monsignor Ferréol, vicar apostolic of Korea, and consecrated bishop in 1854, he arrived secretly in the capital of Seoul in 1856 due to persecution, devoting himself to the study of the language and then immediately to apostolic work. In 1866, when circumstances seemed favorable, persecution broke out instead. Berneux was arrested in February, repeatedly imprisoned and tortured, and then, along with three of his missionaries, was beheaded on 8 March of that same year. His cause for beatification was introduced on 13 November 1918.
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BERNI, FRANCESCO. — Born in Lamporecchio in the Val di Nievole in 1497, he studied in Florence, donned the clerical habit, and in 1517 came to Rome during the pontificate of Leo X, relying also on the protection of a distant powerful relative, Dovizi da Bibbiena. Upon the latter’s death in 1520 and the Pope’s in 1521, Adrian VI succeeded him, a pontiff who was neither long-lived nor favorable to men of letters, poets, or Florentines. He was followed by another Medici, Clement VII, but with little advantage for Berni. He then entered the poorly remunerated service of Cardinal Angelo Dovizi, nephew of the previous one; later he passed to the even less remunerated service of the datary Giberti, Bishop of Verona, and followed him to that city. He returned to Rome in time for the Sack of 1527. In the end, he served Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici. A supposed Lutheranism of his is legendary. It was invented in 1554 by Vergerio, who sought to lend it credence by publishing, in a pamphlet purporting to be an excerpt from the *Rifacimento dell’Orlando innamorato*, eighteen stanzas that had never existed and others fabricated for the purpose: a literary forgery. It is true, however, that the forger had been inspired by four authentic octaves against Roman corruption, and in the *Dialogo contro i poeti*, Berni reproaches the humanist habit of conflating, in a single veneration and almost in a quasi-religious manner, the poetry of Sacred Scripture and profane poetry. Whatever may be thought of this, Berni was prone to moral resentment, as he demonstrated in a famous, scathing tail-piece sonnet against Aretino, unparalleled in the anti-Aretinian literature of the Franco and Doni circle for the quality of its indignation.
In the remainder of his poetic work, the genius of poetry almost always concealed this moral impulse behind parody, caricature, and even jest, yielding chapters in praise of the least praiseworthy things (the plague, the heat of the bed, gudgeons, eels, debt, etc.), which inaugurated a new and fruitful literary genre: the *capitolo bernesco*, beloved by the 18th century, cherished by Baretti, and longed for by the Romantics. The *capitolo bernesco* rests on the ambiguous grace of word and style, which almost always manages to float above vulgarity and avoid prolixity. The same may be said of his tail-piece sonnets. Naturally, not all are masterpieces. Berni was not lacking in comic imagination, which, purged of its last remnants of passion, could produce the great chapter on *Fracastoro*, recalling the hospitality received from a boorish priest. Seen through his eyes, events naturally take on a grotesque perspective. To create, he needed to know and see things from the kitchen and the anteroom; poetic fate favored him, making him live amid the wings of the theater of life and in the underbelly of high society. From there came his tail-piece sonnets on Clement VII, witty in their vulgarity. Some letters of his also survive, but they are not of great merit, and we are not surprised that Berni, a humanist despite everything, continued to feel little affinity for vernacular prose. His rustic comedy in verse, *La Catrina*, is of interest almost solely for the sparkle of its popular language. This bohemian was, in short, a fine man of letters, and fundamental to his best inspiration remains his sensitivity as a linguist. Only thus can we explain the most surprising of his labors, the *Rifacimento dell’Orlando innamorato* of Boiardo. To justify it psychologically, critics have sought hidden intentions: that he wished to parody, or to uncover obscenities, or to purge them, or to direct a sidelong glance at reform through prologues and additions. None of this is the case. The *rifacimento* came at the perfect moment amid the controversies over language: a relay in the nascent purism and of the Accademia della Crusca, its fortune bound to theirs. The *Orlando innamorato* was the only great chivalric poem not written in Tuscan, and the Tuscans were distraught at being unable to admire it without this reservation. Berni sought to remedy this. Whether he thereby rendered a service to that masterpiece is more than doubtful, but certainly the *rifacimento* succeeded in supplanting the original for centuries. Some delicate Latin compositions complete Berni’s literary output.
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*Berni, Francesco – Portrait, in the Parnassus of Raphael. Vatican City, Raphael Rooms.*