[3] L'Épée then turned his attention toward charitable services for the poor, and, on one foray into the slums of Paris, he had a chance encounter with two young deaf sisters who communicated using a sign language.

[5] In line with emerging philosophical thought of the time, l'Épée came to believe that deaf people were capable of language and concluded that they should be able to receive the sacraments and thus avoid going to hell.

Though L'Épée's original interest was in religious education, his public advocacy and development of a kind of "Signed French" enabled deaf people to legally defend themselves in court for the first time.

L'Épée died at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, and his tomb is in the Church of Saint Roch in Paris.

In 1791, the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets à Paris, which L'Épée had founded, began to receive government funding.

Although he advised his (hearing) teachers to learn the signs (lexicon) for use in instructing their deaf students, he did not use their language in the classroom.

While L'Épée's system laid the philosophical groundwork for the later developments of Manually Coded Languages such as Signed English, it differed somewhat in execution.

As a result of his openness as much as his successes, his methods would become so influential that their mark is still apparent in deaf education today.