Wild Boy by Mary Losure Page A

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, none 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.

O NE 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