He became a Catholic priest, and an orientalist pupil of his brother in Paris[2] Fourmont became a private tutor, and was given the Chair of Syriac at the Collège royal in 1720.
[5] They were under instructions from Jean-Paul Bignon, the king's librarian, to search out surviving Byzantine manuscripts,[6] and the journey was supported by the Comte de Maurepas, for the greater glory of French scholarship.
[7] Fourmont traveled in Greece and the Aegean Sea for over a year, but had little luck in finding early manuscripts of ancient authors sitting in monastic libraries.
He would report to Maurepas in February 1730: Since I have been in the Morea and the buyurdi (written order) of the muhassil-aga (senior Ottoman official) was sent, I have visited all the monasteries of the Argolid, of Sicyonia, of Achaea, of Arcadia, of Messenia, and some of Elis and Tsakonia.
I have read nowhere that, since the restoration of literature, anyone has had the idea of turning whole cities upside down to find these marbles, which are the only irreproachable evidence of antiquity, the only things capable of shedding light on the dark corners of history, of the administration and religion of ancient peoples.
The Irish traveler Edward Dodwell reported that when he visited Sparta (in 1806) he was shown marbles that Fourmont had mutilated so as to make their inscriptions illegible.
In 1791 Richard Payne Knight published An Analytical Essay on the Greek Alphabet, in which he argued that Fourmont had forged some inscriptions in his collection.
Where inscriptions could be relocated, Fourmont's transcriptions of the Greek text frequently proved inaccurate: "Corrupt, like most of the Fourmontiana", in Böckh's verdict.
[16] Dodwell's verdict is harsh but probably accurate: "Great ambition, and a little learning, with an unfeeling indifference for the monuments of antiquity, incited him to destroy some of the most venerable and interesting records of ancient history.