His father, Léon Rhoné, Master of Requests (maître des requêtes) at the court of auditors, died prematurely in 1847.

A month later Rhoné, Devéria and some friends sailed to Egypt, where he saw Alexandria, Cairo, Memphis, and the work on the Suez Canal by Ferdinand de Lesseps.

[4] In 1867 Rhoné joined the newly created National Museum of Antiquities (Musée des Antiquités nationales) in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

This may have been when Rhoné decided to alert Paris to the impact of the improvements by the Khedive Isma'il Pasha on the ancient city, which had been relatively undisturbed in 1865.

[4] Rhone did much to publicize the discoveries of Egyptology in articles in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts and Le Magasin pittoresque.

He detailed the "vandalisme restaurateur", the "vandalism of the restorer", on buildings such as the Mosque of Sultan al-Muayyad, a fifteenth century masterpiece.

In 1881 he wrote "the city of Cairo was still intact, at least in the sense that its monuments continued to fall quietly into ruin following the eternal way of the Orient; at least nothing was attempted in the way of works called 'improvement' and 'Restoration.

In restoration work, he agreed with Viollet-le-Duc about the need to understand the original context when a monument was built, and with William Morris about the need to respect and preserve all periods of a building.

[8] A decree of 10 January 1881 charged Rhoné with a mission to the East, particularly Egypt, to study Arab and Egyptian monuments.

[9] Rhoné published Réflexions sur l’enlaidissement progressif des villes qu’on embellit (Reflections on the progressive disfiguration of cities by improvements) in 1889.