Wild Boy

by Mary Losure

  Now, remembering Victor’s fear of heights, Itard strode to the room’s fourth-story window and threw it open. “With every appearance of anger,” Dr. Itard wrote, he advanced upon Victor, grabbed him by the seat of his pants, and thrust him out the window with his head hanging over the stone courtyard, far below. He let Victor dangle, “his head directly turned towards the bottom of the chasm.”

  Then, at last, he pulled Victor back in.

  “He was pale, covered with a cold sweat, his eyes were rather tearful, and he still trembled a little,” Dr. Itard wrote later. “I led him to his cards. I made him gather them up and replace them all. . . . Afterwards he went and threw himself on his bed and wept.”

  It was the first time Dr. Itard had ever seen him cry.

  From then on, when Dr. Itard made Victor do his lessons even when he was tired or it was time to go outside. Victor no longer went into rages. He “contented himself with giving signs of weariness and impatience, and uttering a plaintive murmur which ordinarily ended in tears.”

  But after that day, Victor did something that his teacher wrote only a few lines about — he ran away.

  Dr. Itard wrote that Victor “escaped” from Madame Guérin on the streets and “shed many tears on seeing her again.” Hours later, his breath still came in gasps and his heart was racing fast.

  Another time, he went out wandering on a wide street crowded with carriages, called the rue d’Enfer. Night had fallen before Madame Guérin found him. He recognized her in the dark by the smell of her hands and arms and was so happy he laughed out loud.

  EACH DAY when Victor’s lessons were over, he could go outside with Madame Guerin.

  When the hour neared for their trip to the park, he’d drift to the window. He’d hover at the door. When it took Madame Guérin too long to get ready, he’d get her bonnet and shawl and set them in front of her. Sometimes he was so impatient, he’d try to put them on her himself. Then he’d open the door, lifting the latch (by pulling the latch string) himself.

  When they went to the gardens that lay around the Paris observatory, Madame Guérin and Victor would often visit the Observatory’s caretaker, who had a house on the grounds.

  The man always gave Victor a drink of milk in a china cup. One day by accident, Victor broke the cup. So the next day, all on his own, he brought a little wooden bowl. After that he always brought the bowl in his pocket.

  After his milk, he liked to get people to give him rides in a wheelbarrow. He’d find someone in the caretaker’s house, take the person by the arm, lead them to the wheelbarrow, and climb in. If the person didn’t push him right away, he’d get out and roll the wheelbarrow a little way himself, to make sure they understood. Then he’d get in again and wait for his ride.

  One day, Madame Guérin brought Victor a set of metal squares. They fit neatly into a specially made box that had rows of little wooden compartments, each one marked.

  The mark on the first compartment looked like this: A.

  The mark on the last one looked like this: Z.

  It was Victor’s task to take all the metal squares out, then put each one back into the compartment where the mark matched the shape. A . . . B . . . C . . .

  So Victor took them all out, in order, and set them aside in neat stacks, in order. Then, without ever having to look at the shapes themselves, he set them all back in the right place. Bang, bang, bang, and it was done!

  Dr. Itard came in and watched.

  After that, Dr. Itard made Madame Guérin mix all the shapes up. Then Victor had to put them all back, each in the right compartment.

  Dr. Itard’s way was a lot more trouble, but Victor did it anyhow.

  One morning at breakfast time, Dr. Itard arrived, bringing a board and four metal shapes.

  Dr. Itard put the shapes on the board and pointed to them.

  L-A-I-T.

  Then Madame Guérin gave Dr. Itard some milk.

  Dr. Itard held the milk pitcher in one hand and gave the letters to Victor with the other.

  Victor put the letters back on the board like this:

  T-A-I-L.

  That didn’t seem to be what his teacher wanted. So he tried again.

  L-A-I-T.

  Both Dr. Itard and Madame Guérin seemed very pleased! Beaming, Madame Guérin poured the milk into his cup.

  A week later, when it was time for his walk with Madame Guérin to the Observatory Gardens, Victor brought along his little wooden bowl, the same as he always did. But, unknown to anyone, he had also brought something else.

  When they got to the house where he was always given milk, he reached into his pocket, took out four metal shapes, and laid them on the table.

  L-A-I-T.

  VICTOR COULD TELL when his teacher was happy.

  And now, he’d made his teacher very, very happy.

  But there was something deep inside Victor that still longed for his old life.

  One night when the full moon shone through his window, Victor woke and stood looking out, past the formal gardens and over the Institute walls to where the moonlit fields began.

  Downstairs, Madame Guérin heard his footsteps and went quietly up to his room to see what was happening. Victor stood by the window, his forehead close to the glass, his eyes fixed on the distant fields. Now and then, he drew deep breaths and made a sad little sound.

  Madame Guérin noticed it happened often when the moon was full.

  Only once since he’d come to Paris had Victor been allowed outside the city. He and Itard had driven to the countryside north of Paris, where Dr. Itard was visiting some friends. In the carriage, Victor stared eagerly out one window and then another, his joy showing in his eyes and his whole body. Whenever the horses slowed and seemed about to stop, his excitement grew.

  When he and Itard reached the country house, “such was the effect of these outside influences, of these woods, these hills, with which he could never satisfy his eyes, that he appeared more impatient and wild than ever,” Itard wrote. The boy could scarcely eat: he seemed to Itard to be wishing he were back in his old life, “an independent life, happy and regretted.”

  After that, Dr. Itard decided the country was too much of a temptation for Victor. Instead, he would be allowed to go only to formal gardens like the Luxembourg. There, the flowers were planted in squares, the trees grew in rows, and the fountains sat at the ends of straight paths. The gardens’ “straight and regular arrangement had nothing in common with the great landscapes of which wild nature is composed,” Dr. Itard wrote. They were nature civilized. Nature tamed.

  Once, in the summertime, Victor and Dr. Itard were invited to dinner at the grand country house of an elegant, beautiful, very fashionable lady named Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier. Madame Récamier, who was known for her glittering parties, thought that meeting the famous wild boy would amuse her other dinner guests. She’d invited a general, an ambassador, a number of French aristocrats, an English lord and his lady, two duchesses, and the future king of Sweden and Norway.

  Dr. Itard and Victor arrived in a carriage. Victor hopped out.

  Inside Madame Récamier’s château, the summer light shone through windows hung with silk draperies. Room after room was decorated with dark mahogany furniture, bronze candleholders, and marble statues. Madame Récamier’s couch, built in the style of the lost city of Pompeii, sat beneath a “garland of flowers, escaping from the beaks of two gilt-bronze swans.” Such couches were all the rage that year.

  When they reached the dining room, “Madame Récamier seated him at her side, thinking perhaps that the same beauty that had captivated civilized man would receive similar homage from this child of nature,” Madame Récamier’s biographer wrote. But “the young savage hardly heeded the beautiful eyes whose attention he had himself attracted.” Instead, the wild boy ate his dinner with “startling greed,” filled his pockets with “all the delicacies that he could filch,” and left the table.

  Absorbed in their dinner-table discussions, no
ne of the guests, it was said, even noticed Victor was gone until they heard a noise from the garden. They rushed outside to see the boy “running across the lawn with the speed of a rabbit,” dressed only in his undershirt. Then, the story goes, he ripped it off and jumped naked from tree to tree till he was lured down with a basket of peaches, . . . wrapped in a petticoat belonging to the gardener’s niece, and sent home.

  The Savage of Aveyron was “bundled into the carriage that brought him,” one horrified observer reported, “leaving the guests at Clichy-la-Garenne to draw a sweeping and useful comparison between the perfection of the civilized life and the distressing picture of nature untamed.”

  Madame Récamier and her guests trailed back into the château. That evening, they ate fruit and ices and played charades.

  The Distressing Picture of Nature Untamed (along with, perhaps, the basket of peaches) was soon back in the city, at home with Dr. Itard and Madame and Monsieur Guérin.

  And with Julie, too, on Sundays.

  ONE TIME, during a lesson, Victor noticed that Dr. Itard was using a little metal tool to hold a piece of chalk too short to pick up with his fingers. When Victor was alone in his room, he decided to make his own chalk holder. He rummaged in a cupboard, found an old kitchen skewer, and tied a piece of chalk to it with thread.

  A few days later, Dr. Itard found the tool in Victor’s room. By the “inspiration of really creative imagination,” he was clever enough to convert the kitchen skewer into a real chalk holder, Dr. Itard wrote, thrilled. It was the kind of thing that gave the doctor hope that someday, his pupil would learn to talk.

  Dr. Itard had always dreamed that if Victor could learn what words were really for, the two of them would be able to communicate mind to mind, and “the most rapid progress would spring from this first triumph.”

  But no matter how hard Dr. Itard tried, Victor didn’t seem to understand that words were the only real way to communicate.

  But was that really true? Were words the only real way to communicate?

  Each day when the students at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes walked from their classes to their workshops or streamed out into the garden to play, they laughed and chattered among themselves. But they didn’t chatter out loud.

  As their heads bent toward one another, their fingers danced in intricate patterns as fast as speech. Ideas flew through the air. With their hands and eyes and faces, they could talk about their lives before they came to the Institute and their hopes for the future. They could discuss God and the universe. Each morning, they said the Lord’s Prayer in sign language.

  Dr. Itard had known from the first time he’d met the wild boy that communicating with hand gestures came naturally to him.

  Yet it never seemed to occur to Dr. Itard to try to teach Victor formal sign language.

  Dr. Itard himself had never learned it, even though he spent more than thirty years working at a school for deaf children. Like many people in those days, he did not believe that the formal signing used by deaf people was a real language. He wanted Victor to speak, and to Itard, that meant speaking aloud.

  As the months went by, Dr. Itard devised one lesson after another. Victor had no way of knowing that every single one of them had the same goal: that someday, someday, he would learn to talk.

  Victor learned to read a few words, yet “this reading conveyed no meaning to him,” Dr. Itard wrote sadly.

  Dr. Itard made labels: BOOK and SCISSORS and HAMMER. He showed Victor the labels, then told him to get what was on them. Back and forth Victor would go, from his room to Dr. Itard’s study. “He often stopped in the corridor, put his face to the window which is at one end of it, greeted with sharp cries the sight of the country which unfolds magnificently in the distance, and then set off again for his room, got his little cargo, renewed his homage to the ever-regretted beauties of nature, and returned to me quite sure of the correctness of his errand,” Itard wrote.

  When Victor did well at his lessons and his teacher praised him, happiness would spread across his face. He’d laugh out loud. But other times, when he didn’t understand, he’d become deeply unhappy. “I have seen him moisten with his tears the characters which are so unintelligible to him, although he has not been provoked by any word of reproach, threat, or punishment,” Itard wrote.

  And still, the lessons went on.

  Dr. Itard blindfolded Victor and had him listen to different sounds: a bell, a drum, a wind instrument, even the ringing of a rod struck upon a fire shovel. Victor liked these lessons — he used to bring the blindfold to Dr. Itard and “stamp with joy when he felt my hands tie it firmly behind his head.”

  Dr. Itard said the sounds of the vowels (“Oh! Oh!”) and had Victor raise a different finger for each of the letters a, e, i, o, and u.

  Dr. Itard had Victor watch his teacher’s face and imitate the expressions he made. “Thus we have instructor and pupil facing each other and grimacing their hardest.” After that, Dr. Itard had Victor try to imitate his voice when he talked. But the sounds Victor made now were less like talking than they had been, long ago, when the lessons first began.

  Once, on a day when Victor’s lessons had gone particularly badly, Dr. Itard sat down in despair. He recalled it later in his writings.

  “‘Unhappy creature,’ I cried as if he could hear me, and with real anguish of heart, ‘since my labors are wasted and your efforts fruitless, take again the road to your forests and the taste for your primitive life. Or . . . go . . . die of misery and boredom at Bicêtre.’

  “Scarcely had I finished speaking,” Dr. Itard wrote, “when I saw his chest heave noisily, his eyes shut, and a stream of tears escape through his closed eyelids, with him the signs of bitter grief.”

  Itard wrote that at times he wished he’d never met the wild boy. Sometimes he wondered whether it had been right, so long ago, to tear the boy from his old, happy life in the forest and bring him to live in Paris.

  But now, of course, it was too late.

  WITHIN THE HIGH WALLS of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, the boy who was called Victor grew into a young man of about eighteen.

  Then, one day in June of 1806, a letter arrived at the Institute, addressed to Dr. Itard. It was from the French Minister of the Interior, an office now held not by Lucien Bonaparte, the wild boy’s eccentric friend, but by one of his successors, Jean-Baptiste de Champagny. “I know, sir, that your care of the young Victor who was entrusted to you five years ago has been as generous as it has been diligent,” the Minister wrote.

  For all those years, ever since Lucien Bonaparte first authorized it, the government had been sending money to the Institute for Deaf-Mutes to pay for Victor’s education. Now, the current Minister wrote, it was “essential for humanity and for science to know the results.”

  And what could Dr. Itard say?

  He would have to tell the Minister that Victor had not learned to speak.

  The experiment Dr. Itard had begun with such “brilliant hopes” had ended in failure. And it was not just Victor’s failure, but Dr. Itard’s as well. He claimed that for himself, he didn’t care. “As for me,” he wrote, “I am quite indifferent both to forgetfulness and to disdain.”

  There would be no more lessons.

  Dr. Itard wrote that he had decided to resign himself to failure and abandon his pupil to “incurable dumbness.”

  At about that same time, Madame Guérin’s husband, Monsieur Guérin, fell ill. For years, he had sat down every day to meals with Victor and Madame Guérin, but now he was taken away from the apartment to be nursed back to health. Victor didn’t know that, so he kept setting Monsieur Guérin’s place at the table, only to be told to put it away. Then finally, Monsieur Guérin died.

  That evening Victor set Monsieur Guérin’s place. When she saw it, Madame Guérin burst into tears.

  Victor put Monsieur Guérin’s dishes back in the cupboard and never set his place again.

  Then Madame Guérin herself got sick. For days, she lay in bed. The hour
for Victor’s walks came and went, but he waited patiently. Two weeks passed, and at last, Madame Guérin was able to get up again.

  “As soon as his governess [Madame Guérin] left her sick bed, his happiness burst forth, and became greater still when, on a very beautiful day, he saw her prepare to go out,” Itard wrote. Madame Guérin put on her bonnet and shawl . . . but she left the apartment alone.

  When she returned, she sent Victor to the kitchen to fetch their supper. He loped down the stairway and into the courtyard.

  Just then, on the busy streets on the other side of the wall, a carriage rattled and came to a stop. The gatekeeper swung open the heavy wooden doors, and the carriage drove into the courtyard.

  In the instant before the gates closed again, Victor slipped through and was gone.

  A CLOSE OBSERVER might have noticed something odd about the silent, neatly dressed young man hurrying down the street called the rue d’Enfer. His gait, perhaps, was a little heavy. But soon, Victor was just one more figure in the crowds on the busy streets.

  He hurried past the Luxembourg Gardens, where he’d once scampered with Dr. Itard. He passed the Observatory Gardens, where he’d gone for his walks with Madame Guérin and been taken, years ago, for rides in a wheelbarrow. What did that matter now?

  At the end of the rue d’Enfer stood a massive stone gate known as the Barrière d’Enfer, one of many gates set in the wall that encircled the city of Paris. It was guarded by men in stiff blue-and-red coats and shiny boots.

  Perhaps Victor stopped there and gazed uneasily, remembering the policemen who had once taken him by horseback to the orphanage. Perhaps he turned away from the gate. But in any case, he was not caught.