Louis Nicolas Philippe Auguste de Forbin

He was conscripted into the army, married an heiress, Mlle de Dortan, then gained leave from his regiment in 1802 to travel to Rome with Granet, where he fell into the facile manner of a highly accomplished dilettante,[2] as he was received by the best of Francophile Roman society; in 1804 he was given the post of chamberlain to Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's sister Princess Pauline Borghese.

The Borghese collection of antiquities purchased from Prince Camillo helped fill the void, and the former Cabinet du Roi and works of art in storage at Versailles.

The suites of paintings by Rubens and Le Sueur from the Palais du Luxembourg now came to the Louvre, and the remnants of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic musée des Augustins, as the works that had been sequestered from churches were returned to them.

The company, which departed from Toulon 22 August 1817,[4] was composed of Forbin, his cousin, abbé Charles-Marie-Auguste-Joseph de Forbin-Janson, later Bishop of Nancy, the architect Jean-Nicolas Huyot, the painter Pierre Prévost, later known for his landscape panoramas, and a young painter, Cochereau, Prévost's nephew, who was taken on to provide architectural drawings and renditions of sites, but succumbed before the expedition reached Athens; almost unnoticed was a young man who swiftly took Cochereau's place, Louis Maurice Adolphe Linant de Bellefonds, destined for a career in Egypt.

The party visited Melos, where Huyot had the misfortune to break his leg and could not join the company at Athens, Constantinople, Smyrna, Ephesus, Acre, Syria, Caesarea, Ascalon on the coast of Palestine, with a side trip to Jerusalem the Dead Sea and the River Jordan, and finally Egypt.

After the 13-day journey from the port of Jaffa "which had been one continued series of privations and disagreeable incidents of every kind", Forbin observed of Damietta, The streets are narrow and unpaved, and the houses made of bricks, but the whole are half destroyed.

You cannot walk in the town, without being under apprehensions of some worm-eaten post or projecting part of a building falling on you: the whole surface is covered with dust and rottenness; the mosques have lost their gates, and the minarets threaten to crush the passenger with dilapidated and half broken down arches.