“ He had a perfect passion for exploration. Besides his early expeditions to Greece, he visited the south of Italy three times with this object, and it was while exploring in Calabria that he met with an accident which ended fatally in Paris on the 9th of December 1883, after a long illness. The amount and variety of Lenormant’s work is truly amazing when it is remembered that he died at the early age of forty-six. ”

“ In 1874 he was appointed professor of archaeology at the National Library, and in the following year he collaborated with Baron de Witte in founding the Gazette archéologique. As early as 1867 he had turned his attention to Assyrian studies ”