Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

Looking back to antiquity, this excellent writer points out that the ancients regarded the education of deaf-mutes as an impossibility both physical and moral.

It was the custom at Sparta to allow children suffering from this double infirmity to die of hunger and thirst in the desert, where they were for that purpose exposed; and the laws of Solon were on this point no less severe. Aristotle, if he did not precisely justify the rigour of such laws, at least endorsed the moral prescription. In the fourth book of his History of Animals he unhesitatingly relegates deaf-mutes to the rank of idiots, declaring them hopelessly beyond all tuition. The Republic of Rome did not show itself more humane. It was in vain that intelligence beamed in the face of these unhappy victims: if their tongue could produce no sound they were condemned to be flung into the Tiber.

One of the earliest agents in the removal of this weight of infamy from the fraternity of deaf-mutes was, curiously enough, the stage. Lucian eulogises the pantomime of the dumb-show actors of his epoch, and the admirable influence they exercised in raising the deaf and speechless above general contempt. The Egyptians and Persians, more civilised and enlightened in this respect than Sparta, Athens, or Rome, showed for their deaf-mutes a solicitude which approached devotion.

In centuries less remote many efforts have from time to time been made by philosophers and philanthropists to invent an effectual method of instructing deaf-mutes. The sign method of the Abbé de l’Épée was one of the first great steps in this direction. The abbé held that the old-fashioned dactylology was insufficient, and that signs were essential to those who could neither hear nor speak. Starting from the incontestable principle that the bond existing between ideas and sounds which strike the ear is not more intimate, more natural, than the bond between ideas and traced characters which strike the eye, he found it by no means difficult to demonstrate the possibility of fully replacing speech, in the case of a deaf-mute, by mimicry.

As regards this mimicry, M. Berthier cautions people against the common mistake of confounding it with dactylology, or the language of the fingers. Dactylology is confined to the servile reproduction of the letters of the alphabet of any particular language, one by one, syllable by syllable, word by word, or in no matter what other conventional manner. Mimicry, a faithful picture of human thought, paints ideas and sentiments in a living language—the innate language of all nations—the language of humanity. By means of it thoughts are exchanged more quickly than by speech or writing—not to mention dactylology, which lags so far behind.

In the midst of his brilliant triumphs the Abbé de l’Épée had frequently to engage in conflict with two classes of powerful adversaries: the philosophers and the theologians; the former regarding words as the only vehicle for imparting metaphysical ideas, the latter regarding them as the sole means of inculcating supernatural religious truths.

Louis XVI. had granted the abbé out of his own privy purse an annual pension of 6,000 francs, in addition to his official appointment at the Célestins. Hitherto the school had, for twelve years, been maintained entirely at the cost of the founder, aided by such occasional alms as he received for the purpose. It was at the Célestins in 1789 that he expired, amid the weeping of his pupils and with the delightful thought that his work would not perish with him.

Amongst the disciples of the Abbé de l’Épée must be mentioned the Abbé Sicard, canon of Bordeaux, whom the archbishop of that town sent to Paris, where he had founded a deaf-mute institution, in order that he might study under de l’Épée that method of which there was so much talk. The high talents of this young priest soon enabled him to divine, comprehend, and complete the thought of his master in exciting the warm sympathies of the public towards those unfortunate persons whose tongue was tied and whose ear was stopped.

On the death of de l’Épée, Sicard competed for and was unanimously awarded the management of the abbé’s institution. Having already written not a little on the subject of deaf-muteness, he now published other works, “A Deaf-mute’s Course of Instruction,” among others, which only served to increase his renown; though in this treatise there was indeed one highly objectionable assertion concerning the condition of a deaf-mute which the author found it necessary to retract in his “Theory of Signs.[{203}]”

During the Revolution of 1793 the Abbé Sicard did not escape persecution. Flung into prison after the eventful 10th of August, he was lucky enough to keep his head on his shoulders during the massacres of September. He had scarcely been set at liberty when, as editor of the Catholic Annals, he was condemned to transportation to Cayenne; and he passed the next two years of his life in flight far from his beloved institution, of which he did not resume the direction till after the Revolution of the 18th “Brumaire.” He died in 1822.