 Born in Notre Dame du Gaure, Nantes, France, he served as commandant of Fort Michilimackinac, in what is now Michigan, from 1683 to 1690.In 1684 he traveled to Fort St. Louis to assist Henri de Tonty against the Iroquois, and it is thought that during this journey he constructed a temporary fort that Tonty visited in the winter of 1685/1686, and later referred to as the "Fort of Chicagou".Kovalyov

Kovalyov, often spelled as Kovalev (), or its feminine variant Kovalyova, Kovaleva (), is a common Russian surname, an equivalent of the English "Smithson" (derived from the Ukrainian word "koval" (), which means "blacksmith").