A subject of painful and anxious interest occupied the thoughts of the Abbé de l’Epée during his declining years. He had solicited from government an endowment to perpetuate his institution after his own death, but he obtained only promises. However, he knew that his art would exist in Vienna if it should be forgotten at Paris, and this gave him some consolation. When the Emperor Joseph visited his institution he expressed his astonishment, that a man so deserving had not obtained at least an abbey, whose revenues he might apply to the wants of the deaf and dumb. He offered to ask one for him, or even to give him one in his own dominions. “I am already old,” said M. de l’Epée: “if your majesty wishes well to the deaf and dumb, it is not on _my_ head, already bending to the tomb, that the benefit must fall, it is on the work itself.” M. de l’Epée found, however, some feeling hearts in France. Many masters, taught by him, carried the fruits of his instructions into different cities in that kingdom, as well as into foreign countries. At Bordeaux an establishment had been formed by the archbishop, M. de Cicé, which owed its celebrity to its instructor, the Abbé Sicard, a young priest who had been sent to learn the theory and the practice of the method employed by the illustrious teacher at Paris. It is said by De Gerando, that “the pupil soon became acquainted with his master’s views, and seized them with enthusiasm.” He was eminently calculated to see their value. Gifted with a vivid and fertile imagination, he had a singular ability in clothing abstract notions in sensible forms; he had a particular talent for that pantomime which is the proper language of the deaf-mute, and which the Abbé de l’Epée had proposed to carry to a high degree of developement in his system of methodic signs: endowed with an enterprising and flexible mind, he would search for and discover new and various modes of expressing and explaining ideas and precepts. He appeared to possess a kind of natural talent for communicating with deaf-mutes. This was the man who was destined to succeed M. de l’Epée. His talents and his virtues proved him to be worthy of receiving that inheritance of glory and of beneficence. His successes filled his master with joy, who, in the overflowing of his hopes, said to him one day, “Mon ami, j’ai trouvé le verre, c’est à vous d’en faire les lunettes.” A testimony as honourable to the modesty of the one, as to the talent of the other. Sicard was in full possession of his master’s ideas; amply has he developed and extended them by his own clear and analytical mind.