He worked for Robert Estienne, who was one of the earliest Parisian printers to print Roman type, in the style of Aldus Manutius.
[1][2] He was a contemporary of other eminent French printers, such as Simon de Colines and Geoffroy Tory, while Claude Garamond, whose roman type became the most influential in Europe, apprenticed with him around the year 1510.
[5] In 1533 he published anonymously Queen Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir de l'âme pécheresse ("The Mirror of the Sinful Soul"), a work of mystical Christian poetry that was immediately condemned by the Sorbonne's Faculty of Theology and forwarded to the Parliament for censorship.
Under orders from King Francis I, Marguerite's brother, the Sorbonne retracted their condemnation of Miroir, alleging that their scrutiny was only due to the anonymous nature of its publication.
Each successive edition contained more and more Calvinist content, with the third edition also containing a verse translation of Psalm 6 by royal poet Clément Marot, at a time when the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church in France opposed the translation of the Bible into Middle French.