by Mary Losure
The Minister had sent the letter months ago, back in the winter, but by the time it reached Rodez, the wild boy was already at the Central School. The Minister had decided to let him stay there for a time, but now that time was up.
That July, in the year 1800, the Minister sent another order, commanding Professor Bonnaterre to bring the wild boy to a special school in Paris. The Institute for Deaf-Mutes, as it was then called, was for children who couldn’t hear or speak, who were known in those days as “deaf-mutes.”
It was run by one of the members of the Society of Observers of Man, a man named Abbé (abbé is a French word for priest) Roche-Ambroise Cucurron Sicard.
Who was, it seemed, quite eager to meet the wild boy of Aveyron.
AS HE SAT IN THE CARRIAGE, the wild boy wore the same rough tunic and leather belt he always did. His feet, as usual, were bare. Beside him on the carriage seat was a little sack packed with a few familiar foods: rye bread, potatoes, beans, and walnuts.
It was July 20, 1800, and the wild boy, Bonnaterre, and Clair were on their way to Paris. The wild boy didn’t know that, of course. How could he, without words, understand?
The wild boy was good at reading the expressions on people’s faces. But what did they mean now, the looks on Clair’s kind face and Bonnaterre’s cold one?
And how could the wild boy ask, using only his hands? He’d always known how to show people what he wanted — a quick rap on a pitcher for water, a finger pointed at the key to his room when he wanted to go to bed. But what is the motion for “Where are we going?” What is the gesture for “What is going to happen to me?”
Day after day, the countryside jogged by outside the carriage window.
Bonnaterre noticed that the wild boy always kept his little sack of food close to him. “Whenever we changed carriages or arrived at an inn, he stopped in front of the door and would not enter the lodgings until preceded by this object of his dearest affection,” he wrote scornfully.
But how could the wild boy help wondering, What will happen when the sack is empty?
There are times in the wild boy’s life that are hidden, as though a sudden fog swirled down, misting everything; the wild boy’s long journey to Paris is one of them. If he had adventures along the way, the only one who saw them (at least, who could write things down) was a grim, narrow-nosed professor. Bonnaterre left a few clues, nothing more.
Still, from those clues, and from old maps of the time, it’s possible to figure out some of what happened.
The road from Rodez led upward into more mountains, even higher and more remote than those the wild boy had come from. When he came to streams, the wild boy would lie down on his stomach and drink, “putting his chin into the water right up to his mouth,” Bonnaterre noticed. Maybe it was in these wild mountains that the wild boy tried, again, to run away. “During our trip, he . . . made several unsuccessful attempts at escape,” Bonnaterre noted. The professor did not say where or how the wild boy escaped, or who caught him. Was it Clair who chased after him, calling him back, pleading? Was it a villager who set after him with dogs baying in the night?
On rocky, winding roads they traveled past deep gorges and waterfalls and lonely marshes where wild birds cried. Then they descended to a plain. There, the roads were wider, paved with lava.
They came to a town called Clermont, built of the same dark stone. Its filthy streets looked like tunnels through a dunghill, a traveler there once noted; sickening smells hung so heavy in the dark, narrow lanes that the wind from the mountains could barely blow them away.
Perhaps it was in that dark, dirty city that the first gawkers began gathering. Bonnaterre wrote later that during their trip, they were pestered by “curious people who stationed themselves in crowds along our route.”
But wherever it first began, the staring eyes and the jabbering faces were back.
From Clermont, the road to Paris wound through fields of golden wheat, ripe for the harvest. But as the days passed in the hot, dusty carriage, the wild boy grew listless.
As they neared the town of Moulins, about halfway to Paris, the boy began to shiver in the July heat. He wouldn’t eat. When they stopped to change horses, he could hardly get up.
For the wild boy had a fearsome, dreaded disease — smallpox.
The first symptoms of smallpox are a rash, first on the face, then on the arms and legs. Then, as the disease takes hold, the rash changes to something much worse — raised, pus-filled bumps that can leave behind deep pits that scar a victim’s face forever.
That is, if the person is lucky enough to survive.
Clair worried, but what could he do?
Even Bonnaterre was worried, he wrote in a letter.
Later, another scientist would write a few lines about the wild boy’s sickness: “He refused to eat for two days; he was sad and troubled. He was not given any medicine.”
But he was tough, that wild boy.
He’d survived many things that would have killed other people. Now smallpox was one more.
“He recovered very well in a few days,” the scientist noted. When the disease had passed, the wild boy had no new scars — only his old ones, the burns and slashes he’d had for so long.
Now he barely had time to rest before being bundled back into the carriage.
In early August, eighteen days after they’d left Rodez, they neared the city of Paris. Ahead in the distance rose two sets of low hills. Between them, in a blue haze, spread a sea of slate roofs, chimneys, and church spires. The sun had already set and the summer night was falling as the stagecoach clattered into the city.
“[He] arrived . . . at ten o’clock at night in the charge of an old serving man who has been caring for him . . . and of a professor of natural history at the Central School of Rodez, Citizen Bonnaterre,” an article in one of the city’s newspapers, the Gazette de France, announced.
“As yet we know very little about the child, who will now be the object of observations by true philosophers [a term then used to mean scientists] and who will surely be visited promptly.” The scientists, the article said, would be eager to find out all they could about the wild boy, “down to the slightest movements he might make to express his first sensations, his first ideas, his first thoughts.”
The newspaper noted that Professor Bonnaterre had placed the wild boy “in the hands of the Father of deaf-mutes,” Abbé Sicard.
In those days, many people believed it was a miracle that so-called deaf-mutes could be taught to read or write. Abbé Sicard had become famous as a “miracle worker.”
Now the Institute had a new pupil, and all of Paris was watching.
WHEN THE WILD BOY ARRIVED at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, he lay down on the ground and went to sleep. Abbé Sicard woke him up and offered him bread, but the wild boy wouldn’t eat. Instead, he made motions to the Abbé that he wanted to sleep.
He was allowed to rest for several days.
He slept and slept, and when he woke, he was in a room high in the Institute’s tall white-stone buildings. He shared it with Clair.
Below their window lay a high-walled garden with formal paths and a reflecting pond. Beyond the garden, the wild boy could see open country. But on all other sides, behind high walls, lay slate rooftops and city streets.
In the summer mornings, the sounds of carriages clattering over the cobblestones and the cries of street vendors would have drifted up from the streets below. And the city smells, too: chimney smoke and horse dung and a myriad others.
What would the wild boy’s life be like in this place?
His door opened on a hallway that led to a spiral staircase. If he and Clair followed it, down and down, the marble steps led to the building’s front doors, which opened on a courtyard walled by other school buildings and shaded by a giant elm. More doors, on the back side of the building, led to the garden that lay below the wild boy’s window.
Everywhere, in the halls and on the spiral stairway and in the courtyard and gardens, chi
ldren came and went. They never spoke aloud. Instead, they made gestures with their hands, the way the wild boy did.
When they played, they laughed and made natural, untrained cries, the way he did.
What did he think when he first saw these children who, like him, communicated with their hands and their eyes?
Perhaps in the beginning he watched them, closely, but they were not kind to him. He soon experienced what one observer described (without saying any more) as “a certain amount of ill-natured treatment” from “children of his own age.”
What could the wild boy do then, but try to stay out of their way?
“He detests children of his own age and runs away from them without fail,” wrote a man named J.-J. Virey. (Virey was a scientist who worked at a nearby hospital, observed the wild boy at the Institute, and wrote a report on him.) “He likes solitude a great deal; crowds irritate him and make him uncomfortable and temperamental; he avoids them as much as possible.” He also noted, “If he is afraid of something, he throws himself in the arms of his caretaker [Clair] and pushes him urgently toward his room, where he tries to close himself in and remain alone.”
Already, a Paris vaudeville theater had staged a musical comedy called The Savage of Aveyron. A melodrama based on a novel about a wild child was showing at a second Paris theater.
A poster appeared with the caption “The Savage of Aveyron, currently at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes.” It showed a drawing of a boy wearing a most peculiar costume: an orange-and-black striped gown with ruffles at the neck and sleeves, not to mention a ridiculous, beribboned hat. And if that wasn’t enough, the boy in the poster had what looked like claws on his hands and feet!
When sightseers got to the Institute, of course, they soon found out the poster was a fraud, but they kept coming anyway. The wild boy was “annoyed and victimized . . . by idle curiosity hunters of Paris,” one man at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes wrote, “and by the so-called observers [scientists], who bothered him just as much.”
The scientists, like all of Paris, were curious about the wild boy’s past life. What was it like, they wondered, living in the forest like a wild beast?
The scientists were eager, too, to find the answers to questions that scientists in those days wondered about, such as “What is the True Nature of Man?” and “What role does Civilization play in the True Nature of Man?”
But for the wild boy to answer any of the scientists’ questions, he had to be taught to talk. And surely, the scientists thought, that wouldn’t take long.
After all, the wild boy had a wonderful new teacher now: Abbé Sicard, the Miracle Worker.
A portrait of Abbé Sicard in his classroom shows a kindly man in a black coat, white wig, and shiny-buckled shoes. In the painting, he’s trying to teach a young deaf girl to speak by holding her arm and applying a slight pressure to her wrist and elbow. Other girls, wearing elegant gowns and dainty slippers, watch with rapt attention.
It would indeed have been a miracle if such a method had worked, but it didn’t. It is very, very difficult for truly deaf children to learn to speak aloud; pressing gently on their arms will not do the trick.
What the Institute for Deaf-Mutes actually did succeed in doing for its students was to teach them to read and write, using teachers who communicated with sign language. And that, in those days, was considered a “miracle.”
But now, all of Paris expected the Abbé, the miracle worker, to do something he never had before: teach a “mute” child to talk.
And for some reason, Abbé Sicard did not seem eager to try.
Certainly the barefoot, dirty wild boy was not at all the kind of student the Abbé was used to: boys in uniforms, girls in white muslin dresses.
And besides, why should the Abbé risk his reputation by trying to teach some strange grubby boy who might be no more than an imbecile? What if the Abbé failed? Then what would people think of the “miracle worker”?
So as the days passed, the wild boy did not become Abbé Sicard’s pupil after all. Instead, he remained only a spectacle exhibited to curious visitors.
At night, before the wild boy went to sleep, “he stood at the window, pressed against the grating, gazing at the countryside,” J.-J. Virey wrote (after talking to Clair). “Sometimes he dreams and becomes agitated, as if he were vexed. He usually has these dreams after a lot of people have visited him during the day.”
Was this to be his future?
One day at the end of August, the wild boy got into a carriage again, this time with Abbé Sicard and Professor Bonnaterre. It clattered through the Paris streets and stopped before a vast and splendid building. Soon, the wild boy was padding in his bare feet down gilded hallways and into the magnificent apartments of the French Minister of the Interior, Lucien Bonaparte.
The Minister had sent a letter to Abbé Sicard, telling him to present the “young savage of Aveyron” to him at noon that day.
One person who saw the wild boy there reported that the boy reminded him of a bear in a menagerie, his eyes glancing anxiously at the door and windows.
But the Minister of the Interior turned out to be an eccentric, artistic, and handsome young man. He patted the wild boy on the head and seemed well pleased with him, another observer wrote. The observer wrote, too, that the wild boy showed “lively joy.”
The meeting lasted a little less than half an hour, but when it was over, the boy (though he would never know this) had made an important and influential friend.
After the meeting, the wild boy was let out in the Minister’s garden, where (the first observer noticed) he ran very fast, giving “very lively cries of joy.”
Fall came, and then the damp cold of a Paris winter. In the Institute’s high-walled garden, the fruit trees pinned to the garden walls lost their leaves, the flowers withered, and the grass turned brown. The wild boy roamed the garden alone.
For Clair had gone home to Rodez.
The old man had once had a family of his own; in his lifetime, Clair was married and widowed twice. Now, perhaps, he had people who loved him waiting at home, but in any case, he had stayed with the wild boy as long as he could.
Before he left, Clair told the scientists that if they ever got tired of studying the wild boy, Clair would come back to Paris and get him. He’d take the wild boy home, Clair said, and be a father to him.
But the wild boy had no way of knowing that.
All he knew was that “his old guardian, whom he appears to love very much”—as one newspaper report had put it — was gone.
And now, the wild boy was neglected by everyone who once had been so eager to bring him to Paris. Often, he went hungry. When he could get food from the kitchen, he crept in a corner and ate it all by himself. Sometimes, for reasons that were never written down, he was locked in a dark closet.
Sometimes he had seizures. He rocked back and forth endlessly. Deep in his throat, he made his unhappy humming noise.
Days went by, then weeks. And Clair did not come back.
The other children at the school — about forty boys and twenty girls — lived in a different world from the wild boy.
At five o’clock every morning, a drumroll so loud they could feel the vibrations woke the boys in their dormitory. They jumped from their cots, put on their uniforms of blue cotton blouses, blue pants, sweaters, and berets, and presented themselves for inspection. Then they trooped down the spiral staircase to the ground-floor dining hall.
After breakfast, the students went off to their classrooms, where they learned to read and write from their deaf tutors. The boys also worked in shops, where they learned trades such as carpentry, shoemaking, and tailoring.
After dinner, both boys and girls were let out to play in separate parts of the garden. When he saw the other children, the wild boy ran and hid.
Sometimes he crouched in the Institute’s attic behind a pile of old building materials.
But when rain pattered on the roof and everyone else went inside, the wild boy o
ften crept out into the garden, to the tiny, formal reflecting pond that sat among the flower beds. He would circle the pond several times, then sit by its edge and rock himself back and forth as the rain dimpled the surface of the pond. He’d gaze into the water, toss in a handful of dead leaves, and watch them drift.
THE RAIN FELL STEADILY.
Inside the Institute a young doctor stood at the window, looking out into the garden. Like the wild boy, he had dark, deep-set eyes and unruly hair. His name was Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard.
He worked in the hospital just down the street, and sometimes he came to the Institute to treat the students there. Some time ago, he had noticed the strange boy roaming the Institute garden. He had begun observing him, quietly and from a distance. He had noticed the wild boy’s habit of sitting alone by the pond in the rain. “I have often stopped for hours with inexpressible delight to consider him in this situation,” he wrote later. But Dr. Itard was not the only one watching the wild boy.
That winter, a famous psychiatrist named Philippe Pinel issued a report that, like Professor Bonnaterre’s, concluded that the wild boy was most likely an “imbecile.” The report went on to suggest that if the boy really was an imbecile, then the best place for him was . . . an insane asylum.
Pinel himself had been the director of two Paris insane asylums: one for men and boys, and one for women and girls. He believed “imbecile” children must be “condemned to vegetate sadly in our asylums” because they were incapable of learning. The asylum where boys were sent was called Bicêtre. It was a huge, fortress-like building on a hill just south of Paris.
Only a few years earlier, it had been a terrible prison.
“Debtors are incarcerated [imprisoned] here,” a man called Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote of Bicêtre. “Beggars, and madmen, together with all the viler criminals, huddled pell-mell. There are others, too; epileptics, imbeciles. . . .”