Charles de Maricourt

Charles de Maricourt, a Viscount in the sources and brother of the French consul at Larnaca, Louis Dumesnil de Maricourt, is credited with finding a deposit of terracotta figurines near the Salt Lake. Demetrios Pierides wrote to Melchior de Vogüé on 12 June 1865 that the Viscount had found a "fourmilière" of terracottas and dug many up himself, that he and Dominic Ellis Colnaghi then made larger excavations, and that most of the figures were seated goddesses, some in groups with girls carrying a cista. The Viscount was about to return to France, where his collection could be seen¹.

Bonato, working from the memoir of Charles's nephew Léon de Maricourt, places the find after Léon left Cyprus on 13 January 1865: Charles noticed terracotta fragments on a walk to the Salt Lake, the family dug there, and Colnaghi then began digging as well³. Accounts differ on who found it. Lang tells the story of the consul's family in 1864, and Kiely says Colnaghi excavated the cache for the British Museum with the Viscount and Pierides^4,7.

Charles left for France early in July 1865, days before his brother's death¹. In a letter of 7 August 1865, Edmond Duthoit wrote that the failed attempt by the frigate La Magicienne to carry off the Amathus vase was a trick played on him by the Viscount². Duthoit's other letter blames the consul instead⁸.

At Charles's death his nephews divided the collection. The share that went to Georges de Maricourt was left in an attic and later used to fill a ditch in a kitchen garden. About thirty fragments were recovered by Héron de Villefosse and entered the Louvre as "collection Eugène de Maricourt (don Villefosse)"; about sixty pieces have been traced among descendants³.