The seventh star of the pleiade, he was educated at the famous College de Boncourt in Paris, where his mentors were the humananists Muret and buchanan. At school he performed in Jodelle's Cleopatra (1553. For his early Petites Inventions (1556) Ronsard called him the Peintre de la nature. These delicate poems portray a variety of creatures, abstract or real such as in The Hour, The shadow, The Butterly or The oyster.
After an infatuation with military adventures in 1557, he retired to the forests of joinville to become a tutour for the family d'Elbeuf. Here he prepared his richly chaotic, bucolic masterpiece, La Bergerie (1565.
A year before his death, he published Les Armours et Nouveaux Eschanges de Pierres precieuses, Vertus et Peopprietez d'icelles (1576), an occult treatise on the powers of minerals foreshadowing the Baroque imagery of the late Renaissance.