Dagobert Fourcade

Dagobert Fourcade, French consul at Larnaca, wrote a manuscript report on Cyprus in 1844 that describes antiquities being dug up by local people. He was born at Thann on 9 December 1799, had been secretary to Talleyrand, and served at Berne and Naples before his appointment to Larnaca on 4 March 1840. He took up the post on 18 May 1840. On 22 February 1844, after fevers had struck his family, he asked to be moved, and he returned to France that year, although the official end of his term is 14 July 1845¹. He later served at Port-Louis and as consul general at Guatemala, and died on 3 June 1868¹.

Olivier Masson records that Fourcade copied Greek inscriptions at Paphos³. His Memoire, of 231 pages, deals mostly with administration, population, taxes and agriculture. It also describes the colossal stone urn on the hill at Amathus, ten metres in circumference with bulls on four escutcheons, and says it deserved to be taken to Paris, since otherwise it would be broken as two other urns beside it already had been². At Dali he noted that nothing of ancient Idalion was visible, but that the peasants found marble or stone statuettes and fragments of columns and capitals when digging². Masson names Maricourt, who arrived in 1862, as the first consul to form a small collection of Cypriot objects³.

Louis de Mas Latrie thanked Fourcade in L'ile de Chypre for the loan of a memoir⁴. Amandry, Hermary and Masson write that Mas Latrie was helped by Fourcade and Charles Frederic Theodore Goepp⁴. The Bibliotheque Nationale bought the manuscript in 1897 at the sale of Mas Latrie's library¹.