by Mary Losure
Mercier described Bicêtre’s “subterranean dungeons, cut off from the light of day and the sounds of the outer world, save for a couple of tiny outlets in the roof.”
The wild boy, fortunately for him, had no way of knowing what awaited him if people listened to the famous Dr. Pinel.
But the young, unknown doctor who had been watching the wild boy with such pleasure did.
And Dr. Itard believed it was wrong to send the wild boy to Bicêtre. Society had no right, he wrote, “to tear a child away from a free and innocent life, and send him to die of boredom in an institution.”
“I never shared this unfavorable opinion,” he wrote of Pinel’s report. Dr. Itard believed the wild boy could be taught. “I dared to conceive certain hopes.”
So Dr. Itard went to Abbé Sicard and asked for permission to become the wild boy’s teacher. Abbé Sicard granted that, and more. He gave Dr. Itard a job as the resident doctor at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, and with it, an apartment on the Institute’s fourth floor, high above the garden. There, the young doctor could spend all the time he wanted on the task no one else would take — the education of a dirty wild boy.
WHEN THE REFLECTING POND was skimmed with ice and gray skies hung low over Paris, the wild boy had a fire to sit by. He could watch the flames in peace, with no one to tell him “for shame.” He could sit drowsily in a corner, his stomach full, safe from cold-eyed scientists and whispering, giggling sightseers. The wild boy had a new home.
He had gone to live with Dr. Itard’s housekeeper, Madame Guérin, who lived at the Institute with her husband, Monsieur Guérin. Madame Guérin, Dr. Itard wrote later, was a person with “all the patience of a mother and the intelligence of an enlightened teacher.”
The wild boy had his own room, just down the hall from Dr. Itard’s study.
Although the wild boy didn’t know it, Madame Guérin and Dr. Itard had a plan for him. In the beginning, it was quite simple: to treat him kindly, give him plenty of food, and let him do whatever he wanted.
“It was necessary,” Dr. Itard wrote later, “to make him happy in his own way.”
Every day, the wild boy had a long, hot bath, and after a while, he began to lose his animal-like ability to withstand cold. When it was time for him to get in the water, he would test it with his fingers to see if it was warm enough. One time when it wasn’t, he grabbed Madame Guérin’s hand and stuck it in to show her.
Now that he felt the cold, the wild boy began to be less impatient about wearing clothing. He’d realized, Itard wrote, that clothes kept him warm. One chilly morning when the wild boy woke up, someone had left his clothes right by his bed. After several mornings, the wild boy put them on himself. In time — although he disliked them most of all and they always made his gait a little heavy — he even wore shoes.
It was all part of Dr. Itard’s plan.
Every day, the boy was allowed to do what he liked, and for now that meant the things he knew best: “sleeping, eating, doing nothing and running about the fields.”
Almost every day, Dr. Itard or Madame Guérin took him for a walk. They went either to the garden of the Paris Observatory or to the Luxembourg Gardens. Both were only a few blocks from the Institute for Deaf-Mutes.
Not that the wild boy walked. They walked, but he trotted, loped, or galloped. As Dr. Itard put it, these outings were not so much walks as “scampers.” Often, the wild boy would stop to sniff things that to Dr. Itard seemed to have no smell. It was as though the wild boy could sense a whole different world, the world that dogs understand, where smells tell an invisible story. “I have many times seen him stop, and even turn round, to pick up pebbles and bits of dried wood, which he threw away only after holding them to his nose, often with the appearance of great satisfaction,” Itard wrote.
The wild boy’s new life, wrote Dr. Itard, “was the beginning of the intense affection which he has acquired for his governess [Madame Guérin] and which he sometimes expresses in a most touching manner. He never leaves her without reluctance nor does he rejoin her without signs of satisfaction.”
Dr. Itard was a serious, studious man who stayed a bachelor all his life. But even he realized how important it was for the wild boy to have a mother. Itard wrote about it in his own, sometimes rather hard-to-understand way, like this: “I shall perhaps be understood if my readers will remember the . . . influence exerted upon a child’s mind by the inexhaustible delights and the maternal triflings that nature has put into the heart of a mother and which make the first smiles flower and bring to birth life’s earliest joys.”
What he meant was: children need mothers, and now that the wild boy had one, he could begin to be happy.
It didn’t take much, really. “A ray of sun reflected upon a mirror in his room and turning about on the ceiling, a glass of water let fall drop by drop from a certain height upon his fingertips while he was in the bath, and a wooden porringer containing a little milk placed at the end of his bath, which the . . . [waves] of the water drifted, little by little, amid cries of delight, into his grasp,” Dr. Itard wrote. “Such simple means were nearly all that was necessary to divert and delight this child of nature.”
Once when it snowed heavily during the night, the wild boy woke up and with “a cry of joy” ran half-dressed into the garden, Itard wrote. “There, giving vent to his delight by the most piercing cries, he ran, rolled himself in the snow and gathered it by handfuls, feasting on it with incredible eagerness.”
As part of his plan to make the wild boy happy, Dr. Itard often took the boy with him when he was invited out to dinner. If they went on foot, it was impossible to make the wild boy walk by Itard’s side; the boy always wanted to trot or gallop ahead. So instead of walking, they rode in a carriage.
The carriage would rattle through the narrow streets, past tall houses all joined together and capped with shallow roofs like flat-topped hats, so common in Paris. They’d pass archways leading to cobbled courtyards, or poor neighborhoods where ragpickers and water carriers hurried down the streets, going home to their attic rooms. As it got dark, men would light the oil lamps that hung from ropes strung from one side of the street to the other.
The carriage would stop in front of a house glowing with candle- and lantern light.
Inside, the table would be set with the wild boy’s favorite dishes. He would make sounds to the hostess, asking her for what he wanted. If she pretended not to hear him, he’d put his plate beside the dish and stare at it longingly, then rap on his plate with a fork. And if that didn’t work, he could wait no longer. Whoosh! He’d empty the dish onto his plate with a spoon or even his hand.
The wild boy always knew when they were going out to eat, because Dr. Itard would appear in the late afternoon wearing his hat and carrying a clean, folded shirt. The boy would change into it as fast as he could, then follow Itard out the door.
Itard had a name for his pupil now. He called him Victor.
Victor. It had a nice ring to it. A victor — a winner — is someone who triumphs over all obstacles.
Dr. Itard wrote that he chose it for the wild boy’s name because in French, the name Victor has an “oh” sound in it — it’s pronounced “veek-tOHr”—and Dr. Itard had noticed that the wild boy seemed to turn his head when he heard people say the sound “oh.”
But Dr. Itard may have had another reason, too, for choosing Victor — the hope that someday, the wild boy would live up to his new name.
EVERY MORNING, Victor would have breakfast with Madame Guérin and her husband, Monsieur Guérin. Every day, he would set the table with three places. Often, she’d send him down to the Institute’s kitchen to bring back food for their meals.
He’d trot down the hall. Then, when he got to the marble staircase leading to the first floor, where the kitchen was, he’d listen carefully. If he heard echoing footsteps and the laughter of other students, he would stay back until he was sure to avoid them.
Victor liked the neatness and order of the Guérins’
apartment. When something was left out of its proper place, he’d put it back.
Sometimes he went down the hall to Dr. Itard’s study and sat on the sofa.
From time to time, curious visitors came to the apartment. But now if Victor decided they’d stayed too long, he would present them with their hats, gloves, and walking canes, push them gently out the door, and shut it firmly behind them.
Each day, he seemed to grow more like other people. He dressed neatly, in a gentleman’s waistcoat like Dr. Itard’s. A person who didn’t know Victor might even mistake him for “an almost ordinary child who cannot speak,” Itard wrote proudly.
In the evenings, after Victor had gone to bed, Dr. Itard would sometimes stop by to say good night. Victor would sit up for a hug, then pull him close, until Dr. Itard was sitting next to him on the bed. The boy would take Dr. Itard’s hand and put it on his own head — his eyes, his forehead, his hair — and let it rest there for a long time.
Sometimes Victor would pat the knees of Dr. Itard’s velvet pants, rubbing the fuzz this way and that and then, sometimes, putting his lips two or three times to Itard’s velvet knees.
At times like these, Dr. Itard was not a teacher, but as close to a father as he knew how to be. “People may say what they like,” Dr. Itard wrote, “but I will confess that I lend myself without ceremony to all this childish play.”
The wild boy’s new family also included Madame Guérin’s husband, Monsieur Guérin, but very little is known about him.
And there was still one more member, an even more mysterious figure: a girl named Julie. She was eleven or twelve years old, just about Victor’s age.
She was Madame Guérin’s daughter.
For some reason no one knows, she didn’t live in the apartment with Monsieur and Madame Guérin. But on Sundays, she came to visit. And in time, Madame Guérin began to notice that when Julie came, the boy made a sound that no one had ever taught him.
“Lee!” he’d say happily. “Lee! Lee! Lee!”
In the middle of the night, when Madame Guérin thought Victor was asleep, she would hear him calling all by himself in his room. “Lee! Lee! Lee!”
“He is often heard to repeat lli lli [lee! lee!] with an inflection of voice not without sweetness,” Dr. Itard wrote. “I am somewhat inclined to believe that in this painful linguistic labor there is a sort of feeling after the name of Julie.”
It must have been odd for Julie to have a boy who had once lived all by himself in the forest for a brother, but she does not seem to have minded.
If she had stared at him with distaste, Victor (who was good at reading faces) would have known right away. And surely, he would have avoided her, or brought her bonnet and shawl and tried to hurry her out the door.
But instead, he called out her name.
No one can know whether he and Julie really became friends, but there’s a story from around this time (about another, equally mysterious girl) that offers a tiny clue.
Once, a person watching the wild boy on his trips to the Observatory Gardens with Madame Guérin noticed that Victor seemed to be fond of a young girl, the daughter of an astronomer. Sometimes she would motion to him to sit next to her, and he would obey very shyly, like a puppy with his master. If something distracted him, though, he’d run away.
The story seems to show that sometimes, Victor did make friends with children his own age.
So maybe Julie was his friend, too.
Dr. Itard wrote very little about the wild boy’s life with the Guérin family, but one thing is certain: when he was with them, he began, all on his own, to say the beginnings of words.
Victor often heard Madame Guérin use the expression “Oh Dieu!” (Dieu, pronounced “dyuh,” is the French word for “God”) and after a while, he began to imitate her. “Oh dee!” he’d cry. “Oh dee! Oh dee!”
He said it often, Dr. Itard noticed, “in moments of great happiness.”
IN TIME, Victor’s life of doing whatever he wanted all day long came to an end. It began with toys.
“I have . . . shown him toys of all kinds; more than once I have tried for whole hours to teach him how to use them,” Dr. Itard wrote, “and I have seen with sorrow that, far from attracting his attention, [they] always ended by making him so impatient that he came to the point of hiding them or destroying them. . . . Thus, one day when he was alone in his room he took upon himself to throw into the fire a game of ninepins with which we had pestered him. . . . [We found him] gaily warming himself before his bonfire.”
But Dr. Itard — unlike Victor — was a very patient person. If one thing didn’t work, he tried another. After dinner one night, he took some silver cups and turned them upside down on the table. He put a chestnut underneath one of the cups. Victor watched, curious.
The game was an old carnival trick: the one in which a person hides something under one of several cups, then moves them around to see if the person watching can still find the cup with the hidden object.
Victor could.
When Itard replaced the nuts with things that weren’t food, Victor still wanted to play the game.
Dr. Itard was pleased. He wrote that the game was a good mental exercise for Victor; it helped develop his attention span and judgment. It taught him to fix his restless eyes in one place.
One day, when Victor was very thirsty, Dr. Itard offered him a glass of water and said, “Eau! Eau!” (Eau, pronounced “oh,” is the French word for “water.”) And then . . . Dr. Itard wouldn’t give him the water.
Victor waved his hands near the glass, but Dr. Itard acted as though he didn’t understand.
Madame Guérin stood watching. “Eau!” said Madame Guérin, and Dr. Itard gave the glass of water to her, just like that.
“Eau!” said Itard. “Eau!” And Madame Guérin gave the water back.
Victor was frantic. “Water!” he gestured. “Water!” But, Dr. Itard and Madame Guérin acted as though they didn’t understand!
Victor’s arms were flailing, almost as though he were having a seizure, when Dr. Itard finally gave him the water. “It would have been inhuman to insist further,” Itard wrote later.
The next day when Victor sat down to breakfast and held out his cup for milk, Dr. Itard said, “Lait!” (pronounced “lay,” which in French means “milk”). Lait. He looked at Victor. “Lait!” he said again.
Victor was silent.
It happened the next day, too. Victor held out his cup for milk, and Dr. Itard just looked at him. “Lait!” said Dr. Itard, but Victor didn’t respond.
On the fourth day, Victor held out his cup for milk. As it poured into his cup, he said something very softly, almost under his breath.
“Lait,” he said. Then he repeated it. “Lait.”
Dr. Itard was pleased, but he wasn’t satisfied.
Victor hadn’t said the word before he’d gotten the milk. He’d still asked for milk in his old way, by holding out his cup, but Dr. Itard wanted Victor to ask for milk, with a word, not a gesture.
Now every time Victor wanted milk and held out his cup, Dr. Itard would stall, hoping Victor would ask for it in words.
But Victor had his own way of asking — by holding out his cup.
Only when, “despairing of success,” Dr. Itard had given Victor his milk would he say anything.
“Lait,” Victor would say happily, as the milk poured into his cup. “Lait!”
Victor had no way of knowing it, of course, but after that, Dr. Itard devised another plan: if Victor wouldn’t say words to ask for things, maybe he could learn to ask with written words. Itard hoped to teach him bit by bit, in little, tiny steps.
So one day when Dr. Itard came to Victor’s room, he brought a blackboard and chalk. First he drew outlines on it: a key, scissors, and a hammer. Then he set a real key, scissors, and hammer on the blackboard, each object on top of its outline. Next, he picked up all the objects and took them to another room.
Back at the blackboard, he pointed to an outline to show w
hat he wanted, then motioned to Victor to bring that thing. One by one, Victor had to go to the other room and fetch whatever Itard wanted. After a while, to save himself the trouble of trotting back and forth, Victor just brought everything at once, but Dr. Itard didn’t like that.
So Dr. Itard tried keeping all the objects in the same room as the chalkboard. All Victor had to do was pick each one up and place it on its correct outline. It wasn’t hard, and Victor was successful at matching objects to outlines.
After a while, Dr. Itard brought many more objects and drew their outlines on the board. Victor looked at each one, searched for its outline on the blackboard, then placed it where it belonged.
So then Dr. Itard made the exercises harder. He brought in a variety of cardboard shapes in a variety of colors, for Victor to match up in pairs. To match them, Victor had to tell the difference not just between a circle and a square but also between a square and a slightly flattened square, and not just between red and blue but also between sky blue and gray blue, and so on. Each day, the shapes became more complicated and difficult. If Victor made a mistake or was uncertain, Dr. Itard made him do the task over and over and over.
One day, Victor threw all the cardboard pieces on the floor and stomped off toward his bed.
Dr. Itard made him pick up the shapes and match them.
The next day, there were more shapes; the day after that, more. . . .
Sometimes Victor ran to his bed and bit the sheets and blanket. He attacked the fireplace, scattering ashes and red-hot coals and tossing aside the iron frames that held the logs.
One day he got so angry, it seemed as though he were having a seizure.
But every day, there were more cards, and more shapes.
Then one day when Victor went into a fit of anger, Dr. Itard remembered something that had happened some time earlier, when Victor and Madame Guérin had gone to the Observatory Gardens.
That day, they had climbed the spiral stairs inside the Observatory and emerged on the rooftop observation platform. Victor went to the railing to look out and was seized with fright. Itard described it later: “Trembling in every limb and his face covered with sweat, he returned to his governess, whom he dragged by the arm towards the door.”