FOUR

A TALE BASED ON FACT

About a decade after the death of the abbé de l’Epée, as the nineteenth century dawned, Jean Nicolas Bouilly’s dramatic tribute to “the father of the deaf” burst upon the Paris stage to wild applause: it ran for more than one hundred performances, making it the second-greatest dramatic success of the era.^* I have already told how the play focused attention on the plight of the deaf and secured the freedom of the abbé Sicard. The reasons for the play’s success are not difficult to discern. More than a eulogy, or a paean to Epée’s character and acts, Bouilly’s play is an allegory suited to an age of enlightenment and revolution: the abducted and dispossessed young count is every misérable disinherited by fate and society from all the advantages of social life; his savior, the abbé de l’Epée, is every wise and humble teacher who restores his pupil to his rightful heritage. And although Bouilly took some dramatic liberties with the facts, transforming the “despoiler of the young count” into an “evil uncle” named Darlemont, and inventing a lawyer, Franval, who would aid Epée, he accurately portrayed the abbé and his celebrated pupil, whose real name was Joseph, count of Solar (if you shared Epée’s convictions as to his identity). Thus we have “The abbé de l’Epée: founder of the institution for deaf-mutes, age sixty-six.—He maintains a simple, patriarchal character with a penetrating gaze that nothing escapes; while genius and goodness, with a tone of good society and amiable manners, are displayed by turns; but above all, gentle, unaffected piety and an unbounded trust in God. He is firm without arrogance in his treatment of the man who wronged his pupil, and he shows a perfect knowledge of nature.” And “The young count, pupil of the abbé de l’Epée [he is called Théodore in the play]: born deaf and dumb, the only scion of a noble family; age eighteen.—He shows great intelligence, and extreme sensibility; unreserved confidence in his tutor and a quiet, modest demeanor. His glance is quick and penetrating, always accompanied by a gesture signifying that he understands or sees or wishes something to be explained. But the continual proof of his deafness is a happy, amiable smile when people about him are moved to commiseration by his affliction and misfortunes.”

In Act I, Bouilly first entertains his audience with an irrelevant subplot of unrequited love. The son of the evil uncle, childhood companion of the deaf boy, seeks the hand of the lawyer’s sister, but his father is opposed. Then the scene changes and Epée enters with young “Théodore,” who is agitated: after wandering through several cities in search of his home, they have come upon one the boy recognizes, Toulouse. Just before the first-act curtain, Théodore identifies his house—in real life, the home of the count of Solar.¹ It is the most famous scene in the play; a painting of it by Ponce Camus, a pupil of David, as well as of Epée, contributed, along with the play, to making the deaf a cause célèbre.²

EPEE (Brown coat, with black waistcoat, knee-breeches and stockings; white hair, cut round, and curling slightly at the ends; small cap, white collar, clerical hat; gray cloth gaiters with small black buttons; shoes covered with dust, a knotted stick in his hand) By this sudden agitation, this change depicted in his face, I can no longer doubt that he recognizes his surroundings.

   (THEODORE signs more expressively that he remembers the spot)

EPEE Can it be that we have finally come to the end of our long and painful search?

   (The boy advances several steps toward the door, utters a cry, and returns breathless to the arms of EPEE)

EPEE What a piercing cry! He scarcely breathes. I have never seen him so agitated.

   (THEODORE makes rapid signs announcing that he has found his father’s home. He lays his hands one over the other, building up as it were, and joins them together with straightened fingers in the form of a roof—then designates with his right hand the height of a child, about two feet high)

EPEE (Pointing to the mansion) Yes, ’tis there he was born. The dwelling that saw our birth, the beloved scene of our childhood, never loses its power over us.

   (THEODORE makes signs expressing gratitude to EPEE, whose hand he kisses. EPEE signs that it is not he whom the boy must thank, but God alone, who has directed their search. THEODORE immediately falls on one knee and expresses by signs that he is entreating heaven to shed blessings on his benefactor. EPEE bends with uncovered head, and the man and the boy pray together. They rise and fall into each others’ arms)

Act II tells the story of the abduction and dispossession of the deaf boy. It takes place in the home of the young lawyer, where his sister declares her love for the son of the evil Darlemont. A letter from Darlemont arrives, asking Franval’s help in discouraging the romance. Then Epée enters, entreats the lawyer’s assistance, and tells Bouilly’s version of the Solar story. As the curtain falls, Franval accepts the commission to restore Théodore to his rightful inheritance.

What had happened, in fact, was this. About the time Massieu was born and Louis XVI took the throne—on September 2, 1773, to be exact—a tradesman from Séchelles, in Picardy,^* came to the château of Bicětre on the outskirts of Paris, accompanied by a twelve-year-old boy who was deaf and mute. The boy had been found abandoned on the road from Séchelles to Péronne and a police lieutenant in the former city ordered him brought to the château, which served at the time as an asylum for the insane, for the retarded, for the epileptic, and for lost children.³ The boy had pale skin, blond hair, and blue eyes. He had a sweet countenance, in which were read sadness and intelligence; when he wished to communicate, he could infuse his visage with a thousand images and emotions. He was issued the gray cap and gown of the institution and left to wander its corridors, not understanding and not understood, prey to the madness and cruelty of the hearing children and adults imprisoned along with him, for nearly two years.

The boy’s fortunes changed for the better when he fell gravely ill and was transported from the Bicětre asylum to the Hôtel Dieu, a hospital in the center of Paris, in June 1775.⁴ There he received the love and care of a nun, Mother Saint-Antoine, who presented him to the abbé de l’Epée during one of the priest’s pastoral visits. Epée recounted in a letter what the unnamed deaf boy told him at the Hôtel Dieu: “He gave me to understand that he was from an honest and wealthy family; that his father limped and had died; that his widowed mother had four children, two sisters older than he and one younger; that his mother wore ribbons, beautiful clothes and a watch; that she lived in a large house; that they had servants and he himself was always waited upon; that the house had a large garden and a gardener to cultivate it; that the garden yielded much fruit, which was preserved for the winter; that one day he was told to mount a horse with a horseman; that the rider obliged him to wear a mask over his face and that, after leading him far away, very far away, the horseman abandoned him.”⁵

The very evening of his encounter with the boy, the abbé told his story at a salon, which was by chance also attended by the head of the national police for the Paris area.⁶ It sounded to him as if a crime had been committed; a few days later all police brigades throughout the land received a printed notice with the boy’s description, his story, and the order to conduct appropriate investigations.

When the few leads produced by the police circular proved false, Epée chose a name for the boy, Joseph, removed him from the hospital, and placed him with twenty-six of his deaf pupils in the pension of M. Chevreau. The false leads put Epée on his guard, so much so that he was disinclined to trust the letter from Mme. de Hauteserre that the police transmitted to him in June 1776. She was in the habit, she explained, of spending some eight months of the year in Toulouse. In 1773 she had rented an apartment overlooking a vast garden from the widowed countess of Solar. The countess had a daughter of fourteen and a deaf son of twelve, highly intelligent, with blond hair, blue-gray eyes, a thin face, a large mouth, crooked teeth and an anomaly, an extra tooth. He had been led away, in August of 1773, by a retainer of the countess, supposedly to take the waters at Barèges^* to treat his deafness. He had never been seen again. His mother had died two years later and his sister was in a convent in Toulouse.

The description fit “Joseph” exceedingly well and the differences could be explained by the care given him. His face was no longer thin and his teeth had straightened out once the extra tooth had been pulled—by order of Mother Saint-Antoine. Still. deceived before and with other leads linking the boy to Picardy and even to Liège, in Belgium, Epée chose to await a signal from Providence. It came at one of his public exercises, which were held in the handsome and spacious home located at number 14 rue des Moulins that Epée shared with his brother, an architect like their father.⁷

I have a word to say about these exercises, which were largely responsible for spreading the news throughout Europe that the deaf were educable. The public exercises at first followed the morning lessons that the abbé’s pupils, including Joseph, received at his home from 7:00 until noon on Tuesday and Friday of every week;⁸ but soon after they began, in 1771, the crowds seeking admission became so large that the abbé was obliged to add another session in the evening. At the head of the program in my hand for July 2, 1772, I read: “Because the assembly hall can hold only one hundred people, spectators are kindly requested not to remain more than two hours.”

One set of exercises concerned the sacrament of baptism. Epée asked in manual French, “Why is baptism called the portal of the sacraments?” and the pupils responded in written French, as well as in Latin, Italian, and Spanish.⁹ In another exercise nine pupils responded in four languages to questions about baptism and penitence. Why several languages? Epée answered this question himself: to show the world that the deaf could be educated following his method, whatever their national language, and to give the students practice in rearranging their thoughts to correspond to a different grammar.

Still another exercise added German and English to the languages in which eleven pupils responded to questions about the Eucharist. It ended with an oral debate between two pupils on the definition of philosophy (Epée stated openly that they were coached on the arguments beforehand). In the final exercises, described in Epée’s 1776 book, Instruction of Deaf-Mutes by Means of Methodical Signs, the same eleven pupils responded in seven languages to questions concerning penitence; one of these students was Jean-François Deydier, who would later accompany Solar in his wanderings. Another, Louis-Clément de la Pujade, opened the session with an oral discourse in Latin.

Epée had at least two motives for such displays, which continued until the last few years of his life: he was enlightening his society, as were the Encyclopedists, and, fearing that the education of the deaf as a social class might end when his own labors ended, he hoped, by drawing public attention to his work, to see it sponsored by sovereigns worldwide.

If you consider the deplorable state to which the deaf were reduced before Epée, you will understand the public wonderment and admiration at his accomplishment. Uneducated and believed ineducable, those who were deaf at birth or deafened before learning French were hidden away out of shame, or abandoned by the roadside like the count of Solar, or secreted in some institution, or simply left to vegetate. Even those with a natural gift for some trade rarely were taken as apprentices, out of prejudice and fear. That the deaf should discourse in written, much less spoken, French and other languages appeared truly miraculous.

Leading figures of the Enlightenment came to see the miracle. Etienne Bonnot de Condillac came; the philosopher’s philosopher, who profoundly influenced all the French intellectuals of his time with his empiricist theories, Condillac wrote about what he saw at Epée’s school in two of his books and was much impressed with sign language, which he thought far less prone to ambiguity than oral language.¹⁰ The English philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, also attended,¹¹ as did the papal nuncio,¹² the archbishop of Tours,¹³ and John Quincy Adams.¹⁴ Catherine II, empress of Russia, sent her ambassador with an offer of money; the abbé de l’Epée responded that he did not want money but a deaf-mute pupil from Russia instead.

THE ABBÉ DE L’EPÉE WITH PUPILS AND VISITORS

The Holy Roman Emperor, Joseph II, brother of Queen Marie-Antoinette, visited her at the palace of Versailles in April 1777 and with her traveled incognito as the count of Falkenstein to see Epée’s miracle,¹⁵ attending the classes on the rue des Moulins and Epée’s sign-language mass for his deaf pupils at the church of Saint-Roch.¹⁶

As he had with the czarina, Epée refused gifts from the emperor; he asked instead for a disciple to aid in the perpetuation of his work. From his vast empire, which included most of Western Europe, except France and Spain, the emperor chose the abbé Storck and sent him to Epée bearing a diamond-encrusted snuffbox and a letter that began: “Dear Reverend Father—but no, I will say My Dear Abbé, for I love everyone who serves his neighbor and loves him with so much unselfishness.” He begged Epée to “receive” the abbé Storck and to “impart to him your method, which you employ with so much success.”¹⁷ Storck eventually returned to Vienna to found the first Austrian school for the deaf.

It was at the public exercise two months after the emperor’s visit that Providence gave the sign concerning Joseph that Epée awaited. As the abbé was standing for a moment amidst a group of his pupils, a lady in the audience singled out the mysterious boy with her finger and remarked audibly, “Why, it’s the count of Solar!”

When questioned, Mlle. Debierre, for that was the lady’s name, recounted that she had served as companion to the boy’s great-aunt and great-uncle when they visited Paris on summer holidays. Alas, they were dead and could not confirm the identification, but their former maid was not and could. The maid was summoned, and she and the boy tearfully embraced. Of course she recognized her poor little Joseph, the very image of his father. Was it by another act of Providence that the unwitting Epée had given the boy his true name?

So Epée did not, as Bouilly pretends, spend three years waiting for the boy’s mind to open but rather one year for his own mind to open and accept fully his pupil’s story, confirmed by that of Mme. de Hauteserre. Joseph, count of Solar, had cousins and grandparents in the city of Clermont-en-Beauvoisis;^* the abbé asked the king’s permission to take the boy there. In Clermont, Joseph was recognized by twenty-eight people, including his maternal grandfather, whose emotion at seeing his grandson, whom he thought dead of smallpox at Barèges, can well be imagined. With one exception, all aspects of Joseph’s story were confirmed, even to the detail that his father limped; he had indeed contracted gout in his last years. The exception: Joseph said he had three sisters; the count of Solar had only one. But it transpired that his sister had two close friends who often came to visit and who loved him dearly, as a brother. The error and clarification seemed to confirm his story more than if he had made the distinction in the first place. If any doubts remained, two scars would remove them. The cousin asked if Joseph recalled a mark on his father’s face. Indeed the boy did and he traced on his own face the mark of a scar that his father had acquired in an explosion. Several relatives, his wet-nurse, and his schoolteacher knew that the young count of Solar had a birthmark “in the place,” as the abbé referred to it, “where we sit down.” Indeed, his father had said, “If ever my son is lost, he can be recognized by his birthmark.” And so he was!

In Act III of his play, Bouilly wins the audience’s loyalty to the deaf boy by confirming his identity as the young count and by displaying his ability to reason as other men do, a feat then considered miraculous. The abbé enters with “Théodore.” He wears a nut-colored greatcoat, white waistcoat, gray breeches, colored stockings, small boots in buskin fashion, colored cravat, loosely tied; his hair is slightly powdered; he throws off his round hat on entering, and thus shows all the expression of his face. Franval’s mother recognizes him. Playing to the public interest in the newfound means of communicating with the deaf, Bouilly then has the lawyer’s sister, Clémence, express wonderment that a deaf child can “understand everything, express everything.” Epée answers, “Ask him anything you wish,” and the following scene ensues, in which Bouilly’s abbé is forced to communicate with “Théodore” in a drawn-out, awkward pantomime. In fact, Epée and Solar no doubt communicated in French Sign Language but Bouilly preferred something more understandable to his hearing audience.

CLEMENCE Who is (EPEE signs the question to the count by throwing both hands forward, the fingers straight and the nails toward the floor; then with the forefinger of the right hand he describes a half-circle from the right to the left) in your opinion (EPEE raises the fingers of his right hand to his forehead and keeps them there an instant, then points to the count with his right forefinger) the greatest living man (EPEE raises his right hand three times, then both hands as high as possible, brings them down on each shoulder, over the breast to his waist; he expresses “living” by breathing once with great force and touching the pulse at each wrist) in France? (EPEE raises both hands above his head, and points all around. These signs must be very distinct, but quick, and so as not to interrupt the scene)

EPEE (Taking the paper on which the boy has written, and presenting it to CLEMENCE) You see, first, that he has written your question with precision….

CLEMENCE (Reading) Question—Who is, in your opinion, the greatest living man in France? Answer—Nature names Buffon; science indicates d’Alembert; feeling and truth claim Jean-Jacques Rousseau; wit and taste point to Voltaire; but genius and humanity proclaim Epée. I prefer him to all the others.

   (THEODORE makes several signs, expressing a balance by raising and lowering each hand in turn; then raising his right hand as high as possible and pointing to EPEE with the forefinger, then falls upon EPEE ’s breast and presses him in his arms)

EPEE (With emotion, which he endeavors to repress) You must pardon him this mistake—it is the enthusiasm of gratitude. (He embraces THEODORE again)

Act IV is devoted to confronting the despoiling uncle. In the dress of “a rich financier, wig round and powdered,” he soliloquizes: “What have I to fear? … In any case, what intelligence could be given by a deaf-mute?” Epée enters and informs him that his ward is still alive and that God has placed him in safe hands. The uncle denies all, though Epée affirms that “he who for sixty years has studied nature, deciphered every movement, every emotion, easily reads the heart of man. I needed but a single glance to unravel what is going on in yours.” Even when his son enters and recognizes “Théodore” as his cousin, Darlemont remains steadfast in his refusal to confess and the curtain falls.

In the real-life story, the villain was no evil uncle but the countess’s retainer, who was unmasked when the king’s prosecutor ordered an inquiry in Toulouse to determine the identity of the person who, according to Mme. de Hauteserre’s letter, had led the young count off, supposedly to take the waters at Barèges but in fact to the outskirts of Séchelles. It proved to be a young law student, Cazeaux by name, amiable, handsome, witty, who served as secretary to the countess and was utterly devoted to her. He had been seen leaving Toulouse in the summer of 1773 with the young count mounted in front of him. He had returned seven months later, alone, and had taken up residence with the countess, reporting that her son had died from smallpox in nearby Charlas, Cazeaux’s native city, and was buried in the Cazeaux family tomb. The countess had left the matter there; it was widely known that she viewed her deaf son as an embarrassment and a burden. The lovers had moved to a suburb and had had a child, which they gave up for adoption. The countess had died shortly thereafter.

Cazeaux’s story should have been easy to verify. If the young count of Solar had really died and Joseph was not he, there must be a death certificate in Charlas, and, indeed, when the registers of that parish for early 1774 were searched, the death certificate was found. But it was highly irregular: neither the family name nor the Christian name of the deceased was given. There were interpolations, blank spaces, and no signatures from witnesses. The words Comte de Solar appeared to have been added at a later date. Cazeaux was ordered arrested and brought to Paris. An angry mob accompanied by the Toulouse police broke into his home. He was tied up and thrown into jail. The next morning, irons attached to his hands and feet, chains around his body, he was placed in a wagon for the trip to the capital. On arriving, he was cast into an oubliette, a cell constructed six centuries earlier below the level of the Seine, where only the waters of the river, and not a ray of light, infiltrated.

The prima facie case against Cazeaux (and the case Bouilly built against Darlemont) was compelling. There was the agreement between the date on which the young count left his family on a supposedly innocent trip and the discovery of the deaf waif. There were the similar ages and afflictions of the purportedly dead count and the living orphan. There was the resemblance of the orphan to the noble family and his recognition by the family servant. And just as his cousin recognizes the count in the play, so, too, in real life, did Joseph’s childhood companion, his sister, Caroline, recognize him. She was brought to Paris from her convent in Toulouse. Curiously, she was uncertain about the boy’s identity at first but when she conversed with him at length in some form of manual communication, and when he reminded her of various details of family life, she acknowledged him as her brother. Why did Caroline’s ability to communicate with Joseph in an idiosyncratic home sign not convince her from the start that he was her brother? In any event, it certainly convinced Epée.

In Act V of Bouilly’s play, the servant who had taken the boy away and abandoned him confesses that he did so at the uncle’s instigation and then signed a false death certificate. The lawyer prepares a complaint against Darlemont; he asks Epée to sign it and testify as necessary. It is then that Epée recites the lines that brought the audience to its feet clamoring for the release of Sicard: “Théodore is not the only one to whom I owe my care; my other pupils whom I left in Paris suffer much from my absence.” Meanwhile, the count’s cousin has gone off with the servant to extract his father’s confession in the face of overwhelming evidence, and he succeeds. The count is reinstated in his rights. He offers half his fortune, in friendship, to the cousin, who asks how he can ever forget the dastardly acts of his father. Epée replies:

EPEE If Mlle. Clémence would help you—by sharing your fate?

FRANVAL (To EPEE) It is plain that nothing escapes your penetration. (EPEE signs to THEODORE, expressing marriage by twice joining his hands together, and pointing to the finger for the wedding ring. The count joins the hands of the young lovers, pressing them both together on his heart)

CLEMENCE Happy moment, which I was far from expecting!

COUSIN My happiness can be felt, but not expressed.

FRANVAL My joy can only be equaled by my astonishment. (To EPEE) Benevolent man, how proud must you be of your pupil! Compare what he is at this moment with what he was when first presented to you, and then enjoy your work.

EPEE (Looking at the count and those around him) At length I behold him restored to his home, crowned with the sacred name of his forefathers, and already surrounded by people whom he has rendered happy. O Providence! I have nothing more to desire in the world; and when I put off this mortal body, I shall be able to say, “Let me sleep in peace; I have finished my work.”

The end. Of the play, but not the real-life story, for Cazeaux steadfastly refused to confess to abandoning his charge at Séchelles or anywhere else. Indeed, he maintained he could prove that the abbé’s pupil was an imposter and not the count of Solar: He had set out from Toulouse with the count before many witnesses on September 4, 1773, whereas Epée’s pupil had been brought two days before then to Bicětre and had been found abandoned in Picardy a month before that! The bishop of Comminges, who had come to console Cazeaux in his cell, proposed to secure the services of the leading solicitor of the time, Eli de Beaumont.

It was a glamorous case to undertake: suspicions of intrigue in a noble family, accusations based on the declarations of a deaf-mute, the gravity of the crime imputed to Cazeaux, the name of the abbé de l’Epée and that of the duke of Penthièvre (a relative of the king who had agreed to sponsor Joseph’s education)—all these made the affair the talk of Paris. Eli de Beaumont’s briefs were awaited by the bench and the public at large with as much interest as the latest theatrical success or government proclamation. They were announced a week in advance and circulated, freshly printed, among the privileged classes, by whom they were read, debated, approved or criticized; when the lawyer had proved his case in the eyes of this privileged elite, he had half-proved it in the eyes of the bench.

Epée did not consider that the case of his protégé was lost, however. The law allowed a priest to appear before the bar in defense of those called miserabiles personae, and the deaf boy he had named Joseph certainly belonged to this category. He undertook to represent Joseph himself, to be the adversary of Eli de Beaumont and the bishop of Comminges despite the priestly soutane that he wore in this the sixty-sixth year of his life. The reasons why are to be found in his youth.

Charles-Michel de l’Epée was born into a wealthy family—his father was an architect in the king’s service—at Versailles in 1712, near the end of the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV.¹⁸ He completed his schooling at seventeen and presented himself for the priesthood.¹⁹ Then came the first sign of the independent spirit that would shape the rest of his life, including his conduct in the Solar affair. On admittance to the first degree of priesthood, he was required to sign an oath abjuring the heretical teachings of Jansenism. Perhaps Epée believed in tolerating all sects since God tolerated them; more likely he had some positive sympathy with the doctrine of Cornelius Jansen, which emphasized predestination, denied free will, and attacked the Jesuits and the new casuistry. In any case, he refused to subscribe to an oath that would ensure a division within the church.²⁰

Because the young Epée was unyielding in this matter, he was told he could never take holy vows, and was given a deaconhood. Blocked in his religious pursuits, he took up legal studies and four years later was admitted to the Paris bar.²¹ Whether he was repelled by the chicanery of the law courts, as his eulogist, my friend Bébian, contended,²² I do not know, but it is certain that three years later he returned to his religious calling. A lenient bishop gave him a small canonry in his diocese in Troyes, and two years later he was ordained a priest.²³ However, his protector died not long after, and Epée was prohibited not only from administering the sacraments but even from pastoral counseling. He lost his canonry, which the new bishop of Troyes gave to one of his friends.

We know little of Epée’s activities for the next quarter century. We know that he settled in Paris, that he continued to wear clerical garb, that he lived on a modest allowance from his family, that he often visited the poorer quarters, and that he encountered two deaf women on one such visit, which led him, in the fifth decade of his life, to take up the education of this class of outcasts with unparalleled perserverance and self-abnegation.

Yet this knowledge is enough for us to discern the central principle of Epée’s conduct. He who had inherited so much formed in his youth an abiding commitment to the disinherited. Why? Because he feared for his soul. “Saints are created through great struggle,” he told a fellow priest, preacher to the king, who was to give his funeral oration.²⁴ “God has done everything for my welfare and I have done nothing in return for the excellence of His grace.” Thus Epée reasoned: I am prohibited from leading the hearing to know God; I will lead the deaf to know Him. I am prohibited from teaching those who speak to sing His praises; I will teach the deaf to sign them. The state has deserted me through intolerance;^* I will repatriate an entire class of the abandoned as useful citizens. No one will aid me; then I will do it myself. If God is with me, if He gives me the love of my brothers, if His word communicates to me a spark of His creative light, I will overcome all obstacles, I will compensate for the weakness of the senses, I will give men to nature, Christians to the Gospel, citizens to the nation, and saints to eternity.

Epée was consumed by the burning desire to do good as others are consumed by the burning desire of their passions. In either case, strong emotion does not favor clear reasoning, and this may account in part for Epée’s next steps in behalf of his protégé Joseph. Departing from the convention of addressing his brief to the judges, Epée addressed it instead to the lawyer of his adversary. If my pupil was already in Bicětre when Cazeaux left the Solar residence with his charge, he argued, this does not mean that my pupil is not the count of Solar but rather that the boy with Cazeaux was not. In fact, after Joseph was abandoned in Picardy a month earlier, the countess of Solar and Cazeaux must have hired a stand-in. It was, then, the substitute whom Cazeaux buried in Charlas.

It is easy to imagine how vulnerable this argument was to Eli de Beaumont’s acerbic wit. How was the stand-in obtained? Who took the real Joseph off to Séchelles? Why wasn’t his carriage seen? How was he paid? Where is he now? How was the false Joseph induced to contract smallpox and hold his tongue? How were the priests at Charlas and Barèges bought off?

The barrister hired to plead Cazeaux’s case in court was the widely acclaimed Tronson de Coudray²⁵ (who, fourteen years later, would defend Marie-Antoinette in the same courtroom), and he did so—the magistrates of the high court before him, a thousand spectators behind—with eloquence and cunning. It all came down to this, he said. If the youth who was in Bicětre when Cazeaux left Toulouse with his charge was the real count, as Epée claimed, and not a fake, then the accused must have replaced one deaf youth with another deaf youth nearly his twin, shipped the one off to Picardy, and stuck by the other until he decided to die of smallpox. Even the most accomplished storytellers cannot make us suspend our disbelief of such baby-switches merely to have us enjoy their story. Would the abbé de l’Epée succeed and have the court take a man’s life? Would the court indeed tolerate the abbé’s leading a witness with a secret language, unintelligible to the judges, the accused and his defenders, when a man’s life was at stake?

The court ordered Cazeaux released while the inquiry proceeded and Joseph was taken to Toulouse to confront various witnesses in the presence of the judges.²⁶ A veritable cortège accompanied him there: not the abbé de l’Epée, who had gout and could not travel so far, but his maître de pension, M. Chevreau, and Joseph’s classmate Deydier, also Caroline de Solar and her guardian, and judges and officers of the court. Some days later, Cazeaux and another court officer took the same route. On the one hand, Joseph failed to recognize various places and people including, initially, Cazeaux himself; with some prompting he signed that he thought he had seen him at his mother’s home. On the other hand, the Solars’ maid and gardener and a neighbor all recognized Joseph confidently as the young count, as did his schoolteacher and Mme. de Hauteserre, called to the scene. The company adjourned to Charlas, where farmers, shopowners, and town gossips affirmed in one voice that the boy before them was not the one Cazeaux had brought to Charlas six years earlier. Nor did Joseph recognize any of them. Then there must have been two deaf boys and, given the dozens of times Joseph was identified as the count in Paris, Clermont, and Toulouse, it must have been the imposter who was buried in Charlas. All proceeded to the cemetery and gathered round the grave: judges, lawyers, witnesses, doctors, principals to the drama. Behind them no doubt the entire population of the town, restrained by a few gendarmes.

If the tomb was empty, it would prove Cazeaux had kidnapped Joseph, given him to an unidentified accomplice to release in Picardy, simulated Joseph’s death and burial, and somehow disposed of the stand-in. If, however, the tomb contained the remains of a small boy, then the borrowed child died chez Cazeaux, who remained no less guilty of kidnapping and abandoning Joseph. The gravediggers uncovered the tomb little by little and removed the skeleton of a child some eight to ten years old. Boy or girl? The doctors could not say, for the pubic bones were missing. The skull was studied. Doctor Gares announced to the hushed spectators that an indentation in the left half of the upper jaw testified to the existence of an extra tooth. The earth was sifted, a tooth was found, and it fit perfectly in the indentation. The extra tooth of the count of Solar!

The proper conclusion seemed, if anything, more elusive than before. It was agreed that everyone would go back to Paris and reflect. The high court reflected for two years and then issued its verdict: Cazeaux was innocent of abandoning the count of Solar; and the abbé de l’Epée’s pupil was indeed the count and should be restored to his rights!²⁷

The verdict, like the case it decided, was full of contradictions. If Epée’s protégé was the count of Solar, then there had been a baby switch after all, and Cazeaux was guilty of fraud if not murder. If, on the other hand, Cazeaux was innocent of any crime, then the child he had cared for was the count, and Epée’s pupil in Paris at the time could not be he.

Why release Cazeaux? Because there was no direct evidence he had committed a crime. But then why reinstate Joseph as count of Solar? Because of the many identifications, yes, but also because the abbé de l’Epée’s affiliation with the boy placed a halo around him, such was Epée’s prestige. Did the abbé wish a nationwide search conducted by the gendarmerie? Why, it must be done at once. Permission from the king to move an entourage to Clermont? Granted. A sponsor for the boy? The king’s relative himself shall do it. This respect for the abbé, born of his piety and his charity, but especially born of wonderment at his restoration of the deaf to society, Bouilly highlighted in his creation of the role. Indeed, in postrevolutionary, anticlerical France, Bouilly found it inopportune to mention the substance and goal of Epée’s instruction of the deaf, which was the Christian religion. Not a word of the Gospel, much less of Jesus Christ, appears in the play. Epée is transformed instead into a deist, a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, worshiping the Supreme Being and nature, opening the hearts and minds of his pupils to the world around them.

The abbé de l’Epée began teaching the deaf, seeking, as he put it, “to reach heaven by trying at least to lead others there,” in the 1760s, some twenty-five years after his exclusion from the priesthood.²⁸ The chance encounter that launched him on this career is legendary; the few details we have are from his own pen. It took place, he tells us, on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor, in the home of a poor widow who had deaf twin daughters.^* He had gone there on some commission or other, discovered the girls were deaf, learned from their mother that they had been receiving religious instruction from a Father Vanin, who used engravings to explain the lives of the saints, and who had died some time before.²⁹ Imagine the scene: a wretchedly poor quarter of Paris, a narrow winding street paved in cobblestone, a bleak courtyard with refuse piled against vestiges of the ancient walls, a steep, worn stair that leads to a small dimly lit room. The naked walls and ceilings are black with soot from the hearth; jagged scars show where they have shed flakes of whitewash applied by earlier generations long dead. A large rough-hewn table occupies most of the room; three pallets of straw have been pushed under it to clear a narrow passage around it. On the table, a basin and an extinguished candle. Beside it, two young women sit on stools. Some fifteen years old, they wear identical long dresses of solid-colored dark wool, fichus, ^† and frilly muslin bonnets. Their lips are still, their eyes averted, their faces haggard; two young deaf women, sisters in misfortune. Understand what this meant: the deaf cannot go to school; cannot read or write; have few friends. With hearing parents, conversation at home is sparse, kept to essentials. These women cannot have a real trade but neither can they marry; they are useless to themselves and a heavy burden to indigent parents. Sadly, they endure an idle and uniform existence, condemned to grow old in a long childhood. When the father dies, the family becomes poorer still; the two young women do needlepoint to put bread on the table. But if their lives are wretched, at least their souls will be saved: thanks to a kindly priest, Father Vanin, who comes from time to time with his engravings of the saints, they will soon take their first communion. And then the priest comes no more.

Now: enter the abbé de l’Epée in a flowing black soutane; fifty black buttons climb from the hem over an ample belly up to his throat to disappear under a little black dicky fringed in white. Rather patriarchal in manner, Epée, in his late fifties, has a full round face, a penetrating regard. He smiles affably. “Good day, ladies.”

The young women do not hear him enter, continue sewing, do not respond. Epée, so the legend has it, attributes this to an excess of feminine reserve and sits down to await their mother’s return. Why has Epée gone there? I imagine he has been making rounds of the poor to offer such modest help and consolation as he can, to put his life to some Christian use despite the Church’s strictures. When the mother returns she explains everything. The crowning affliction is that her children will never take communion after all. Epée tells us his response: “Believing these two children would live and die in ignorance of their religion if I did not attempt some means of instructing them, I told … the mother she might send them daily to my house.”³⁰

So began the education of the deaf worldwide; so began the long journey of repatriation for this class of outcasts, a journey that has not yet ended. When all the deaf and dumb are educated, there will never be another Darlemont in the world.

But how to instruct these women in the faith? It appeared impossible. Since the women were deaf twins, they were almost surely deaf at birth and in any event before they could learn French. As Epée was keenly aware, Saint Paul had said, “ex auditu fidem” (“Faith comes through hearing”) and Saint Augustine said of the deaf, “Quod vitium ipsum impedit fidem” (“This impairment prevents faith”).³¹ It could not be done. To learn the faith one needed a language, which was to say, speech; his pupils had none.

Why didn’t Epée realize that the signing of the deaf might be the expression of a language of their own, with its own vocabulary and syntax? Why did Sicard miss this fact as well? It was not that the deaf were without this language at the time; it develops wherever deaf people congregate and was all around Epée if he could only have listened to it. The deaf author Pierre Desloges told us that all the deaf of Paris were using sign language. Likewise, one of the delegates to the National Convention,^* arguing that the government had been duped into spending too much money on our school, stated: “Before the abbé de l’Epée, the deaf were not such wise theologians, but they communicated their thoughts easily enough among themselves and with others close to them.… The deaf-mutes that I have known had quite their own sign language grammar long before the abbé de l’Epée established his school.”³² It seems to me that the deaf twins whom Epée was to teach may well have known French Sign Language if they were able to circulate among other deaf people. And the deaf children that Epée would soon gather in his school certainly knew the language. Excuse me if I insist overmuch on the priority of French Sign Language: I do so because hearing people are fond of perpetuating the myth that the abbé de l’Epée was the inventor of the sign language of the deaf. It is not so. The language of the deaf is transmitted each time a deaf mother holds her baby to her breast and signs to it; no hearing person has anything to do with this.

It no more occurred to Epée, however, than it did to the saints that the congenitally deaf could perfectly well learn the faith, or anything else for that matter, through their own language of signs. For hearing people had long concluded that those born deaf could only gesticulate and pantomime. Thus Condillac affirmed that the deaf had no abstract ideas and no memory, for these required symbols, that is, language³³—though once he had acquired a little more familiarity with the deaf, at Epée’s school, he changed his opinion.³⁴ After his death, however, his disciple, Destutt de Tracy, resurrected the old myth: “Without artificial signs and perhaps without spoken signs, there are no abstract ideas, and without abstract ideas, no deductions.” Therefore, even after education, the deaf “have a much more limited ability to think than we do.”³⁵

Fortunately, Epée’s independence of spirit kept him from adopting the prevailing views uncritically. “Faith comes through hearing,” said Saint Paul. Well, perhaps: many people received their faith through the preaching of ministers, but many also by reading, and Saint John had said, “These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.”³⁶ The deaf could come to Him through the written word. Epée recalled a precept from his early training in philosophy at the college^* of Four Nations at Versailles: ideas and speech sounds have no more natural and immediate relation than ideas and written characters.³⁷ So he would give the deaf a language by associating their ideas with written French words.

Of course if a written word can stand for an idea as well as a spoken word can, the same may be said of a signed word. If it is arbitrary how we clothe our ideas to make them visible, then they are equally well dressed in the movements of the hands, body, and face that constitute the sign languages of the deaf. But Epée failed to reach this conclusion from his premise. Instead he reasoned, I will teach them the printed word for bread, pain, by showing them a piece of bread. I will show them the word “saint” and a picture of one. But how will I teach them the word “God,” or “duty,” or indeed any abstract word when I cannot evoke the associated idea by pointing? Explanations in French would be useless, since the sisters do not know the meanings of the words as yet. How was I taught abstract words in Latin? By explanations in my native language. Then I must learn the signs that they use natively, without instruction. These Epée broadly called the language of the deaf, although he thought they lacked a grammar and could not be used directly for education.

“Every deaf-mute sent to us already has a language,” Epée wrote. “He is thoroughly in the habit of using it, and understands others who do. With it he expresses his needs, desires, doubts, pains, and so on, and makes no mistake when others express themselves likewise. We want to instruct him and therefore to teach him French. What is the shortest and easiest method? Isn’t it to express ourselves in his language? By adopting his language and making it conform to clear rules^* will we not be able to conduct his instruction as we wish?”³⁸

When I was in Paris some years ago, I visited a former director of the school that Sicard had founded in Bordeaux. Professor Valade-Gabel showed me six volumes of Epée’s handwritten notebooks, which he had obtained at auction, each one nearly four hundred pages long.³⁹ They contained texts recited by his deaf pupils at the public exercises, notes concerning the pupils and the pensions in which they were placed, some letters, and more than two thousand pages of Christian doctrine explained in question-and-answer format, apparently written beginning in 1764. Also included was the first act of a little play, performed, it seems, in one of Epée’s public exercises. On the left-hand side of the page is the text of scene one, and on the right, not quite a translation in French Sign Language, but a list of the basic signs that would allow Epée to explain the meanings of the French sentences to his pupils (although he did not live among his pupils, it is evident that Epée knew something of the syntax of French Sign Language and its vocabulary).

By comparing the record of the two languages in the play, one sees immediately some of the difficulties Epée confronted when he decided to teach his first two pupils written French by means of the signs they already knew. Here is a sample from the very beginning of the play:

Saprice (a priest) and Nicéphore (his friend)

NICEPHORE Good day, my friend Saprice; how are you?	HOW FEEL?
SAPRICE I am well.	GOOD.
NICEPHORE Did you have a good trip?	TRIP GOOD (or) BAD?
SAPRICE Good enough.	so-so.
NICEPHORE I was very worried about you.	WORRIED-MUCH ABOUT YOU.
SAPRICE Is that really true?	I DOUBT.
NICEPHORE Could you doubt that?	TRUE, TRUE.

Sentences in French Sign Language have fewer words than their French translations; they can dispense with articles, many prepositions, and other words of grammar that French requires because it cannot express relations spatially the way gestures can; and the order of the words is different from that of French. All of these differences could only confirm Epée in his prejudice that sign was not a true language that he could use to instruct his pupils. He thought, however, that he could convert it into one by inventing signs for the French words and word endings that had no direct counterparts and by using all these signs in the French word order. Once the pupil learned all the new signs and the French word that went with each, he could sign any written French sentence presented (as Massieu did for the pope) and could write any French sentence that had been signed in this way (as I did on the same occasion). Whether either party understood what the sentences were about was another matter.

To give you a sample of Epée’s method, here is what he says about how to endow verbs in French Sign Language with the tenses of French: “We get our pupil to take note of the eight different tenses of the indicative mode in French; we write them down in a horizontal order with their respective names. To express something past, our pupil used to move his hand negligently toward his shoulder. We tell him he must move it just once for the imperfect, twice for the perfect, and three times for the past perfect.…”

When it came to nouns, all our signs that referred to objects and events had to have a sign of gender attached as in French. “We raise our hand to our hat for the masculine,” Epée explained, “and to our ear, where a woman’s bonnet ends, for the feminine.” So we cannot speak of an armchair, a tomcat, or a bench (all masculine in French) without putting a hat on them, and every door and dish must have a bonnet in front of it.⁴⁰

Then came the problem of French words for which there were no signs. Of course the deaf could express these ideas in their own language but in different ways. This would not do for signing French in the air; a unique sign or series of signs was needed for each French word. Epée followed Condillac’s precept here: analysis. But the analysis was not conceptual, it was based on Latin etymology. For example, “intelligence” was not analyzed as, say, “can” + “know” but rather as “read” + “inside” because of its Latin roots, legere, to read, and intus, within. Once Epée started putting his Latin to use in this way, he could not stop. Even French words that had a perfectly good counterpart in sign were analyzed; thus, “satisfy” became “make + enough,” “introduce,” “lead + into,” and so on.⁴¹

Finally Epée confronted the problem of suffixes and prefixes; these are alien to sign languages, which achieve the same ends by other means. For example, in American Sign Language, the difference between “wanted” and “unwanted” is, roughly, the difference between the sign for “want” moving toward the signer or away from him. But to transcribe the English word with invented signs, a sign would be needed for “un-,” a second for “want,” and a third for “-ed.” Here is how Epée’s pupils were to sign the word “unintelligibility”: “The first sign announces an internal activity. The second represents the activity of someone who reads internally, that is who understands what is said to him. The third declares that this arrangement is possible. Doesn’t that give the word ‘intelligible’? But with a fourth sign transforming this adjective into an abstract quality, isn’t ‘intelligibility’ the result? Finally, by a fifth sign, adding negation, do we not have the entire word ‘unintelligibility’?”⁴²

In this system, which Epée called methodical signing, even the simplest sentence took on enormous complexity. One example: a line from Racine, “To the smallest of the birds, He gives their crumbs,” required forty-eight signs from Epée’s pupils. “Gives” alone required five signs: those for verb, present, third person, singular, and “give.”⁴³ To the deaf pupil accustomed to expressing such an idea in five or six signs in a different order, the sentence in methodical signs lacked unity, was full of distractions, was far too long for a single unit of meaning, and, in the end, was unintelligible. This did not prevent Epée’s pupils from signing French sentences given a text and, conversely, from writing perfect French given a sentence in manual French; it just prevented them from understanding those sentences—they had to be explained in French Sign Language. For the same reasons, the fact that Epée’s pupils could write French sentences from signed dictation did not mean they could construct any on their own; they could not, and hence Epée never asked them to. “Of course they can’t,” he wrote to Sicard. “Don’t hope that they can ever express their ideas in writing. Our language is not theirs; theirs is sign language. Let it suffice that they know how to translate ours with theirs, as we translate foreign languages ourselves, without knowing how to think or express ourselves in that language.”⁴⁴

The basic progress of Epée’s instruction was this. The pupil would first learn the manual alphabet, one handshape for each letter in French, so he could fingerspell French words. Next he would learn to write these letters and then to write out the conjugation of a verb, for example, “to carry.” To provide him with a few nouns, Epée began with some twenty parts of the body that could be singled out by pointing, and he associated with each the French name of that part written on a card. The pupil would learn to spell those names with letter cutouts. Next he was taught the methodical signs for the persons and tenses of the verb he had conjugated, as well as a few signs for articles and prepositions. Now he could write his first sentence in French in response to dictation in methodical signs. From here on in, the lists of nouns and verbs and methodical signs grew.⁴⁵

I confess that I learned this system of methodical signing from Sicard just as Epée’s pupils had from the master, and I espoused it for some years, even after coming to America with Gallaudet. Thus we would first express some thought in American (or French) Sign Language; for example, “Try to understand me,” which requires two signs, appropriately placed and carried out, that we can label TRY and UNDERSTAND-ME. Then, using the same sign language, we would teach and explain the ten methodical signs so the student could express the thought in manual English: “try” + second person + plural + imperative + “to” + “under” + “stand” + infinitive + “I” + accusative. Finally we would write the corresponding sentence in English words on the board: “Try to understand me.” It took the genius of Sicard’s disciple and successor, Roch-Ambroise Bébian, to help us realize that all this was a needless encumbrance on our instruction, that the labor involved in teaching the ten methodical signs was the very labor required to teach the corresponding English sentence. There was no need for the intermediate step of manual English. And so increasingly we presented the idea in American Sign Language and then turned at once to the written language. By the 1830s methodical signs had disappeared on both sides of the Atlantic.⁴⁶

And so it had to be. Mangling the language of the deaf to make it conform to oral language, or disbarring it entirely, as distinguished gentlemen are urging us to do now, are two forms of the same crime. The failure to use the primary language of the deaf child shrouds instruction in a haze through which meanings and feelings can be only dimly perceived.

Thus the two sisters and all those who would come after them became copyists thanks to Epée’s manual French and educated thanks to his use of French Sign Language.⁴⁷ The best of them also became renowned performers. While I was at Saint-Jacques, I knew four of Epée’s pupils then living in Paris, and we often spoke of him. They were M. de Seine, a sculptor; M. Paul Grégoire, a portrait painter; M. Didier, a grocer, married to a hearing and speaking woman; and M. Roussel, a journeyman printer during the first Revolution,⁴⁸ who occupied a minor office in the treasury department during Napoleon’s reign as first consul. They were among the first educated deaf; they all looked very intelligent old men and they had good handwriting, but their knowledge of French was limited; we conversed at length in sign language.⁴⁹

Still, it was the abbé de l’Epée, son of the king’s architect, who first turned to the poor, despised, illiterate deaf and said, “Teach me.” And this act of humility gained him everlasting glory. It is his true title to our gratitude, for in becoming the student of his pupils, in seeking to learn their signs, he equipped himself to educate them and to found the education of the deaf. For this reason, the deaf everywhere have always excused him for failing to see that the sign language of the French deaf community was a complete language in its own right, not merely a collection of signs, and did not need to be made to “conform to clear rules”—French word order and word endings, to be transformed into “manual French”—in order to serve as the vehicle for instructing the deaf.

As the numbers of Epée’s pupils grew, so did the numbers of his disciples and then the number of satellite schools that the disciples opened in their native lands. The first of these was in France, at Angers, founded by Charlotte Blouin in 1777. Among French schools, Sicard’s came next at Bordeaux, a decade later.⁵⁰ The number of French institutions grew rapidly in Sicard’s lifetime, reaching twenty-one; now there are fifty-four, with more than two thousand pupils.⁵¹

A decade before Epée’s death, his disciple Delo returned to Amsterdam to open the first Dutch school. The abbé Storck, the disciple whom the emperor Joseph II had sent to Paris so that a school might be established in Vienna, trained there the Russian director sent by Catherine II, as well as the founders of some German schools. Storck’s successor, Joseph May, taught many more directors, among them the founder of Danish education for the deaf, P. A. Castberg. Several German princes, however, followed the example of Joseph II and sent directly to Paris teachers who then founded schools for the deaf in their countries. So arose the institutions at Karlsruhe and Prague during Epée’s career, and at Munich, Waitzen, Freising, and Linz during Sicard’s.⁵² The abbé Sylvestri returned to Rome to found his school five years before Epée died; it soon sent teachers to Poland, Naples, and Malta.⁵³ In the year of Epée’s death, Michel de Tarente returned to the Italian city of the same name to open a school, and the following year Henri Guyot did likewise in Groningen, Holland. Three years later, Gosse established a school in Tournai, Belgium, and Hemeling one in the German state of Württemberg. Dangulo and J. M. d’Aléa founded the first Spanish school in Madrid in 1805 and I. R. Ulrich established one in Zurich four years later.⁵⁴ At about this time Per Avon Borg saw Bouilly’s play and decided to follow in Epée’s path. Within a few years he had founded a school on Epée’s methods not only in his native Sweden but also in Portugal.⁵⁵

And so it progressed: in his lifetime, Epée directly caused the founding of a dozen schools throughout Europe. Sicard’s lifetime saw that number grow fivefold. From our institution alone came deaf mathematicians, chemists, painters, sculptors, lithographers, engravers, printers, poets, sailors and soldiers, men of letters, and, especially, deaf teachers of the deaf, who traveled throughout France and Europe to teach their brothers and sisters.⁵⁶ Nowadays there are more than two hundred schools throughout the world founded by Epée’s disciples, twenty-eight of them—including a college for the deaf—in America. And there are more than five hundred deaf teachers of the deaf in Europe and America.⁵⁷

The year that Epée died, 1789, was a year of momentous endings and beginnings for all the hearing and the deaf. On the ninth of July the Constituent Assembly was formed in France to create a constitution for the financially bankrupt kingdom. Louis XVI called his troops to his defense in Paris, but on the fourteenth of July several thousands of Parisians and soldiers in revolt stormed the old fortress prison of La Bastille, symbol of royal power. The king yielded, removing his troops to the provinces and agreeing to replace the white cockade of the Bourbons with the red, white, and blue one of the Revolution. These concessions, a sign of weakness, fueled the peasant revolt in the countryside; a popular militia formed and the nobility began to flee. In the night of August fourth, the Assembly voted an end to the privilege of the clergy and the nobility, an end to feudal rights. On the twenty-sixth they voted the Declaration of the Rights of Man. In October, the revolutionaries went to Versailles “to get some bread”; they killed the king’s guards and obliged the royal family to return to Paris, to the Tuileries; the Constituent Assembly followed. As the year ended, the French government was under the control of the revolutionaries.

Epée’s failing strength coincided with that of the monarchy; his decline had begun toward the end of the Solar trial, which had consumed so much of the energy and time of the seventh decade of his life. By December of 1789, he was dying, rich in acclaim and gratitude, poor in worldly goods. The man who gave the deaf his genius, his heart, and his labor had not withheld his funds. He had inherited a modest income from his father, the equivalent of some $3,000 a year.⁵⁸ With this he paid the pensions of all his pupils, the salaries of his assistants, and the expenses of his home and the school within. In the terrible winter of 1788, when the rivers were frozen, transport blocked, bread in short supply, when the people were dying of famine and cold (thus hastening the advent of revolution)—in that cruel winter, Epée was almost destitute. His soutane was worn, he ate little, and he stopped buying wood for his fire. Legend has it that some of his pupils gathered in his lodgings, set the fire themselves, and would not leave until he promised to shepherd his failing strength and provide for his basic needs. “My children,” he was wont to say thereafter, “I have cheated you of a hundred écus.”^*

Those “children” gathered around his deathbed, joined by a delegation from the National Assembly, chief among them Monseigneur Champion de Cicé, who had sent Sicard to him. He was there to tell Epée that his most fervent wish, the certain continuation of his school, was assured: the Assembly would be asked to take the school under its protection. The parish priest from the Church of Saint-Roch, where Epée had said mass for his deaf pupils, administered the last rites. Then Epée blessed his pupils in sign for the last time. He was buried in the crypt of Saint-Roch, where rest other great benefactors of humanity: the philosopher Diderot, the playwright Corneille, the creator of the French garden, Le Nôtre.…⁵⁹

There is an epilogue to the Solar affair. Neither Cazeaux nor Caroline Solar was pleased with the ruling of the tribunal. If Joseph was in fact the count of Solar he must have been kidnapped and replaced with a stand-in; the guilty could be none other than Cazeaux. As for Caroline, she was to lose half her inheritance to a deaf-mute who, on mature reflection, she doubted was her brother after all!

In 1791 they joined together to appeal the judgment. Conditions had changed in the decade since it was handed down. Epée was dead. The archbishop who had denied him the priesthood now denied Sicard permission to present evidence in behalf of the count of Solar. The duke of Penthièvre had lost all his influence in the Revolution. The high tribunal had been abolished and six district courts established for Paris instead. The second district court gave a definitive judgment in 1792, one that went largely unnoticed at the height of the Revolution: Epée’s pupil Joseph was not the count of Solar and was forever proscribed from using that name or laying claim to any rights or goods of the family.

Joseph inclined to fate: without protectors, without funds, at a time when noble titles were more an onus than a blessing, he abandoned the society that abandoned him and disappeared into the army. According to the legend of hearing people, he died on the battlefield when he could not hear the bugle of retreat. Cazeaux and Caroline de Solar were married. A lawyer for the prosecution in the original trial, full of remorse, left them a small fortune and a house in the countryside, where they lived happily ever after. However, Tronson de Coudray, the eloquent barrister who had successfully defended Cazeaux, became the friend of Jean Nicolas Bouilly and when the Solar affair was over they often used to speak about it; Bouilly gave him before all others a draft of The Abbé de l’Epée to read. “As I pleaded the case,” he told Bouilly, “I came to realize that Joseph was indeed the scion of a noble family. The conclusion of the appellate court was false. The true story of the count of Solar is in your play.”⁶⁰

* The first was the Marriage of Figaro.

*A former province in the north of France.

*A spa in the Pyrenees.

*In the department of Oise, 77 km north of Paris.

*The Crown had made the papal bull against Jansenism a state law.

*The fossés were ditches that ran along the old city walls constructed in the twelfth century.

† A triangular scarf worn over the shoulders and crossed in a loose knot at the breast.

*The revolutionary congress.

*High school.

*I.e., the grammar of French.

*Approximately fifteen dollars.