He then studied sculpting at the École des Beaux-Arts in the studio of Elias Robert, who prompted him to travel to Greece, then throughout the Middle East.
[citation needed] He moved to Cyprus for several years, where he began excavations and discovered many items of which some were carried back to France in 1859 by de Saulcy on his return from the Holy Land, and form the basis of the Cypriot Archaeology collection in the Louvre.
He then participated in two archaeological missions, first in Phoenicia[2] with Ernest Renan in 1859–1861 and again in Cyprus with Charles-Jean-Melchior de Vogüé and the architect Edmond Duthoit in 1862–1864.
[citation needed] Before 1870, Grasset d'Orcet worked as a journalist for the newspapers La Cloche and Le Figaro, and was a reporter for the Havas agency during the Paris Commune.
He worked for 27 years at the La Revue britannique, in which he published 218 articles, the first in 1873 on "Alcoholism in literature", and made numerous translations.