Charles Marie François Olier, marquis de Nointel

[6] At a young age he accompanied P.-E. de Coulanges on a memorable grand tour in 1658[7] through the courts of Germany and Turin and to Venice and Rome, assembling a cabinet of drawings and antiquities on his limited resources.

[9] His charming manners and agreeable personality won the interest of Arnould de Pomponne, through whom he reached the circle of Jean-Baptiste Colbert and the Paris salons, where he developed the gallant, unattached reputation of an honnête homme, a sympathetic audience, a splendid host, a patron to the depletion of his limited fortune.

For the Christians living under the Sultan's rule, and above all the Latin institutions, hospices, chapels, and the like, France wished to be declared official protector in an explicit article in renewed Capitulations.

By June 1673 he had achieved a reduction in customs charges, putting France on an equal footing with England and Holland and giving new life to French commerce in the Levant.

From his tour in the East he made precious acquisitions of coins and medals, marbles and other Antiquities, occurring such debts in the process that Louis XIV, unwilling to pay them, recalled him in 1680.