Estienne de la Roche's family lived in Lyon and also owned property near the town of Villefranche. Because of where he lived when young, La Roche was sometimes known as Villefranche.
He learned mathematics from Chuquet and had in his possession many manuscripts in Chuquet's hand so it appears that he was on good terms with Chuquet.
La Roche taught commercial arithmetic in Lyon for 25 years. Clearly he was well thought of as a teacher of arithmetic since he was often called master of ciphers.
La Roche published Larismetique in 1520 which was considered an excellent arithmetic book with good notation for powers and roots. However in 1880 Aristide Marre published Chuquet's Triparty. It was immediately discovered that the first part of La Roche's Larismetique is essentially a copy of Chuquet's Algebra. It was thought at this time that La Roche was simply a plagiarist. However more recent work has come to a less harsh conclusion about La Roche. It now appears that La Roche was trying to teach important mathematics which was not available to the French public he tried to teach.
The rest of La Roche's work is a commercial arithmetic. La Roche says of his own work that it is
the flower of several masters, experts in the art
such as Pacioli. This statement itself indicates that La Roche was probably in way trying to hide his dependence on others. Indeed La Roche took parts of Chuquet, parts of Pacioli and parts of Philippe Frescobaldi, a French banker who was lesser known as a mathematics writer, and without any real skill on his part formed them into a teaching book.