Louis Dumesnil de Maricourt

Olivier Masson credits Louis Dumesnil de Maricourt, French consul at Larnaca, with being the first of the island's consuls to form a small collection of Cypriot objects¹. He arrived in 1862, and Marangou likewise names him as the first consul to make a private collection, in that year^1,6. Masson points to pieces at the Louvre and at Senlis in connection with him¹. His year of birth appears as 1804 in one place and as 1806 in the title of a 2010 biography by Bonato and Emery⁸.

In 1864, according to Robert Hamilton Lang, the consul's family walked out to the Salt Lake of Larnaca one evening, turned up a small terracotta statue and went on digging there for months⁷. Demetrios Pierides, writing on 12 June 1865, gave the credit to the consul's brother, "Viscount C. de Maricourt", who found a mass of terracottas there and then excavated with Dominic Ellis Colnaghi³. The sources therefore disagree on whether the consul or his brother was the finder.

Edmond Duthoit's letters record a dispute with the consul over the Amathus vase. In a letter of 1865 Duthoit wrote that the consul had asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for a frigate to take the vase without him; the ship came away empty-handed, and the consul apologised after Duthoit confronted him publicly². A later letter of Duthoit's places the same manoeuvre with the brother⁴. Edmond Duthoit described the consul's last illness: he was taken ill on a Tuesday evening and died at about 2 a.m. on Wednesday 26 July 1865, at Limassol, with Duthoit beside him². Masson instead gives death from cholera at Larnaca in August¹. Tiburce Colonna-Ceccaldi was named his successor in September 1865 and reached Cyprus in January 1866¹.