 His unique past allowed him to make unique contributions to French art.One author, Ishbel Addyman, varies from other biographers and claims that he was not a Gascon aristocrat, but a descendant of a Sardinian fishmonger and that the Bergerac appellation stemmed from a small estate near Paris where he was born, and not in Gascony, and that he may have suffered tertiary syphilis.She also claims that he may likely have been homosexual and around 1640 became the lover of Charles Coypeau d'Assoucy, a writer and musician, until around 1653, when they became engaged in a bitter rivalry.