Wild Child and Other Stories

1

During the first hard rain of autumn, when the leaves lay like currency at the feet of the trees and the branches shone black against a diminished sky, a party of hunters from the village of Lacaune, in the Languedoc region of France, returning cold and damp and without anything tangible to show for their efforts, spotted a human figure in the gloom ahead. The figure appeared to be that of a child, a boy, and he was entirely naked, indifferent to the cold and the rain.

He was preoccupied with something — cracking acorns between two rocks, as it turned out — and didn’t at first see them coming. But then one of the party — Messier, the village smith, whose hands and forearms had been rendered the color of a red Indian’s with the hard use of his trade — stepped in a hole and lost his balance, lurching into the boy’s field of vision. It was that sudden movement that spooked him. One moment he was there, crouched over his store of raw acorns, and the next he was gone, vanishing into the undergrowth with the hypersensitivity of a stoat or weasel. None of them could be sure — the encounter had been so brief, a matter of seconds — but they unanimously claimed that the figure had fled on all fours.

A week later, the boy was spotted again, this time at the verge of a farmer’s fields, digging potatoes from the ground and bolting them as they were, without benefit of cooking or even rinsing. The farmer’s instinct was to chase him off, but he restrained himself — he’d heard the reports of a wild child, a child of the forest, un enfant sauvage, and he crept closer to better observe the phenomenon before him. He saw that the child was very young indeed, eight or nine years old, if that, and that he used only his bare hands and broken nails to dig in the sodden earth, like a dog. To all outward appearances, the child seemed normal, having the fluid use of his limbs and hands, but his emaciation was alarming and his movements were swift and autonomous — at some point, after the farmer had approached to within twenty yards of him, the child reared his head and made eye contact. It was difficult to see the child’s face because of the unbarbered thatch of his hair and the way it masked his features. Nothing moved, not the flock on the hill, nor the clouds in the sky. The countryside seemed preternaturally silent, the birds in the hedgerows holding their breath, the wind stilled, the very insects mute underfoot. That look — the unblinking eyes, black as coffee poured straight from the pot, the tightening of the mouth around discolored canines — was the look of a thing out of Spiritus Mundi, deranged, alien, hateful. It was the farmer who had to turn away.

That was how it began, the legend brewing, stewing, simmering in every pot throughout the district through the fall of 1797, in the fifth year of the new French Republic, and into the year that succeeded it. The Terror was over, the King was dead, life — especially in the provinces — returning to normal. People needed a mystery to sustain them, a belief in the arcane and the miraculous, and any number of them — mushroom gatherers and truffle diggers, squirrel hunters, peasants bent under the weight of faggots or baskets of turnips and onions, kept watch in the woods, but it wasn’t until the following spring that the boy was sighted again, this time by a party of three woodcutters, led by Messier, the smith, and this time they gave chase. They chased the boy without thinking, without reason, chased him because he ran from them, and they might have been chasing anything, a cat, a hind, a boar.

Eventually, they ran him to tree, where he hissed and flailed the branches, flinging things down on them. Each time one of them attempted to mount into the branches and snatch for the boy’s callused foot, he was pummeled and bitten, until finally they decided to smoke him out. A fire was built beneath the tree, the boy all the while watching these three bipeds, these shagged and violent and strangely habited and gibbering animals, out of the deep retreat of his eyes. Picture him there, crouched in the highest branches, his skin so nicked and abraded it was like a hide haphazardly tanned, the scar at his throat a bleached white tear visible even from the ground, his feet dangling, arms limp, as the smoke rose about him.

Picture him, because he wasn’t able to picture himself. He knew nothing but the immediate, felt only what his senses transmitted to him. When he was a child of five, small and undernourished, the stubborn thirteenth child of a stubborn peasant family, his mind lax and pre-lingual, he was taken out into the forest of La Bassine by a woman he hardly knew or acknowledged, his father’s second wife, and she didn’t have the strength to do what she had to do, and so when she took him by the hair and twisted his head to expose the taut flesh of his throat she shut her eyes fast and the kitchen knife missed its stroke. Still, it was enough. His blood drew steam from the leaves and he lay there in a shrunken, skeletal nest, night coming down and the woman already receding into the trees.

He had no memory of any of it, no memory of wandering and foraging until his blouse and crude pantaloons were torn, were mesh, were string, no memory at all. For him, there was only the moment, and in the moment he could catch things to feed his hunger, things that had no names and no qualities except their desire to escape him, frogs, salamanders, a mouse, a squirrel, nestling birds, the sweet and bitter sacs of the eggs themselves. He found berries, mushrooms, ate things that sickened him and at the same time sharpened his senses of gustation and olfaction so that he could distinguish what was edible from what was not. Was he lonely? Scared? Superstitious? No one can say. And he couldn’t have said himself, because he had no language, no ideas, no way of knowing he was alive or in what place he was alive or why. He was feral — a living, breathing atavism — and his life was no different from the life of any other creature of the forest.

The smoke irritated his eyes, interrupted his breathing. Below him, the fire built and climbed and everything was obscured. When he fell, they caught him.

2

Fire he knew, remnants of the blazes the farmers made of last year’s stalks and the stubble of the fields, and he’d learned through trial that a potato in the ashes turns to meal, savory and fragrant, but the smoke of the woodcutters’ blaze overcame him so that the air was poisoned all around him and he fell into another state. Messier took him up and bound his limbs and the three men brought him back to the village of Lacaune. It was late in the afternoon, the night already gathering round the trunks of the trees and consolidating the leaves of the bushes as if they’d been tarred. All three were anxious to be home, to warm themselves at the hearth — it was cold for April and the sky spitting rain — but here was this marvel, this freak of nature, and the astonishment of what they’d done sustained them. Before they’d passed the first outlying houses, the boy flung comatose over Messier’s shoulder, the whole village knew they were coming. Pere Fasquelle, the oldest man in Lacaune, whose memory stretched back to the bloodline of the dead king’s father’s father, was out in the street, his mouth hanging open, and every child danced away from courtyards and doorways to come running in a mob even as their parents put down hoes and ladles and stirring spoons to join them.

They took the boy to the tavern — where else, but the church, and there was no sense in that, or not yet, anyway — and he seemed to come to life then, just as Messier was handing him through the door to DeFarge, the tavern keeper. The smith had a proprietary hold on the boy’s legs, supporting him at the small of the back, and DeFarge took possession of the shoulders and head in his soft white taverner’s hands. Behind them, Messier’s two companions and the surging crush of the village, children crying out, men and women alike jostling for position and everyone focused on the open door so that a stranger coming on the scene would have thought the mayor had declared a holiday and the drinks on the house. There was a moment suspended in time, the crowd pressing, the child caught between the outdoors and the interior of that fabricated structure, the feral and the civilized in balance. That was when the child’s black eyes flashed open and in a single savage movement he jerked his head forward and upward, clamping his teeth on the excess flesh beneath DeFarge’s chin.

Sudden panic. DeFarge let out a scream and Messier tightened his grip even as the taverner let go in pain and terror and the child crashed to the floor, rending flesh, and those who saw it said it was just as if a swamp turtle, dredged out of the muck, had whipped round its viridian head and struck out blindly. The blood was there, instant, paralyzing, and within seconds the taverner’s beard flowered with it. Those already in the room jerked away from him while the crush at the door fell back precipitately and the child, Messier gone down with him, bucked and writhed in the doorway. There were shouts and cries and two or three of the women let out with fierce draining sobs that seemed to tear the heart out of the crowd — this was a wild thing amongst them, some beast or demon, and there it was at their feet, a twisting shape in the shadow of the doorway, blood on its snout. Startled, even Messier gave up his hold and jerked to his feet, his eyes staring as if he were the one who’d been attacked.

“Stab it!” someone hissed. “Kill it!”

But then they saw that it was only a child, measuring just over four and a half feet tall and weighing no more than seventy bone-lashed pounds, and two of the men covered his face with a rag so he couldn’t bite and pressed their weight into him until he stopped writhing and the claws of his hands, which had worked out of the knots, were secure again. “There’s nothing to fear,” Messier proclaimed. “It’s a human child, that’s all it is.” DeFarge was led away, cursing, to be treated, and no one — not yet — had thought of rabies, and they crowded in close then, poking at the bound-up child, the enfant sauvage stripped from the fastness of the forest. They saw that his skin was roughened and dark as an Arab’s, that the calluses of his feet were thick and horned and his teeth so yellowed they were like a goat’s. The hair was grease itself and protected them from the unflinching glare of his eyes where it fell across his face and the rough corners of the cloth jammed deep in his mouth. No one thought to cover his genitals, the genitals of a child, two acorns and a twig.

The night wore on and nobody wanted to leave the room, the excess prowling round the open door, queuing up for a second and third look, the drink flowing, the darkness steeping in its post-winter chill, DeFarge’s wife throwing wood at the fire and every man, woman and child thinking they’d seen the miraculous, a sight more terrifying and wonderful than the birth of the two-headed calf at Mansard’s the year past or the adder that had borne a hundred adders just like it. They poked the child, prodded him with the toes of their sabots and boots — some of the more curious or courageous leaned in close to catch the scent of him, and every one of them pronounced it the smell of the wild, of the beast in its lair. At some point, the priest came to bless him, and though the wild Indians of America had been brought to the fold of God and the aborigines of Africa and Asia too, the priest thought better of it. “What’s the matter, Father?” someone asked. “Is he not human?”

But the priest — a very young man with an angelic face and hardly a trace of beard — just shook his head and walked out the door.

Later, when people grew tired of the spectacle and eyelids began to collapse and chins give way to gravity, Messier — the most vocal and possessive of the group — insisted that the prodigy be locked in the back room of the tavern overnight so that news of his capture could be spread throughout the province in the morning. They’d removed the gag to enable the child to eat and drink, and a number of people, women amongst them, had attempted to coax him to taste one thing or another — a heel of bread, a scrap of stewed hare, wine, broth — but he’d twisted and spat and would take nothing. Someone speculated that he’d been raised by wolves, like Romulus and Remus, and would consume only the milk of a she-wolf, and he was given a very small quantity of the nearest simulacrum — the deposit of one of the village bitches that had just given birth — and yet that too was rejected. As were offal, eggs, butter, boudin and cheese. After a while, and after half the citizens in the place had stood patiently over the bound and writhing form with one thing or another dangling from tentative fingertips, they gave up and went home to their beds, excited and gratified, but weary, very weary, and bloated with drink.

Then it was quiet. Then it was dark. Traumatized, numb, the child lay there in a state between waking and sleeping. He was trembling, not from the cold because he was hardened to the weather, even to winter and the bitterest of days, but because of fear.

He couldn’t feel his limbs, the cords so tightly wound they were like ligatures, cutting off circulation, and he was terrified of the strangeness of the place where he was confined, a place that was enclosed on six planes and gave no sign of the stars overhead and no scent of pine or juniper or water in its flight. Animals, bigger and more powerful than he, had taken him for their pleasure, for their prey, and he had no expectation but fear because he had no word for death and no way to conceptualize it. He caught things, quick frightened things, and he killed them and ate them, but that was in a different place and a different time. Perhaps he made the connection, perhaps not. But at some point, when the moon rose and the thinnest sliver of light cut between the jointure of two stones in the near wall, he began to stir.

He had no awareness of time. Flexing, rocking, pushing off with his flexible toes and scrabbling with his nails, he shifted in space and shifted again and again till the cords began to give up their grip.

When they were loose, he tore them off as if they were strips of vegetation, the vines and tendrils and entangling branches that snatched at his wrists and ankles as he perambulated through the forest, and a moment later he was stalking the room. There were two doors, but he didn’t know what a door was and the rigidity of his terror had kept him from discovering its function when he was brought into this place and laid on the compacted floor in a scattering of straw. Nonetheless, he felt them, felt the wood as a texture to itself and a contrast to the stone, and thrust his weight into them.

Nothing happened. The doors — the one leading back into the tavern, the other to the yard — were latched, and even if they weren’t he wouldn’t have been able to uncover the secret of their hinges or their method either. But above him was the roof, thatch over a frame of stripped poles laid close as fingers and toes. A single leap took him there, where he clung upside down like an oversized insect, and then it was a small thing to separate two poles and begin to dig upward toward the scent of the night.

3

For two years and more he eluded capture, hovering like a cauchemar at the margins of people’s thoughts, and when the mistral raked the roofs and shrieked down the chimneys, they said he was stirring up the spirits of the forest. If a hen went missing, they blamed the enfant, though he’d never been seen to consume flesh or even to know what it was; if it rained too much or too little or if rust afflicted the grain or aphids the vines, people crossed themselves and cursed his name. He wasn’t a child. He was a spirit, a demon outcast like the rebel angels, mute and staring and mad. Peasants reported seeing him capering in moonlit meadows, swimming like a rat in the rivers, basking in the sun in summer and darting through the scabs of snow that lay on the winter hills, oblivious to the cold.

They called him the Naked One. L’Animal. Or, simply, the Savage.

For his part, he scraped and dug and followed his nose. On the primal level, he had only to feed himself, and if he raided the fields like any other creature of the forest, he took the same risks as they, to be trapped or shot or startled to immobility by the sudden flapping of a scarecrow’s rags. Still, his diet was barely adequate, as might be imagined, consisting almost entirely of vegetable matter, and in winter he suffered just as the birds did. But he survived. And he grew. Haunting the barnyards, the middens and granaries, he became bolder, quicker, stronger, and farmers took to setting the dogs on him, but he was cannier than any dog and too smart to go to tree. Did he somehow come to understand that people were his tribe in the way that a bear instinctually consorts with other bears rather than foxes or wolves or goats? Did he know he was human? He must have. He had no words to form the proposition, no way of thinking beyond the present moment, but as he grew he became less a creature of the forest and more of the pasture, the garden, the dim margin where the trees and the maquis give way to cultivation.

Then came the winter of 1799, which was especially bitter. By this time, wary of the forest of La Bassine and wandering in search of the next trove of mushrooms or wild grapes or berries and the grubs he extracted from the pulp of decaying trees, he’d worked his way up over the mountains, across the plain between Lacaune and Roqueceziere, and then down again along the bed of the Lavergne until he arrived in the environs of the village of Saint-Sernin. It was early January, just after the New Year, and the cold held a grip on everything. When night fell, he made himself a nest of pine branches, but slept fitfully because of his shivering and the hunger that clawed at his insides. At first light he was up and pawing through the scattered clods of a dormant field, looking for anything to feed into his mouth, tubers, onions, the chaff and scraps of crops long since harvested, when a ghostly drifting movement caught his eye: smoke, rising above the trees at the far end of the field. He was crouched on all fours, digging. The ground was wet. A crow mocked him from the trees. Without thinking, without knowing what he was doing or why, he rose and trotted toward the smoke and the cottage that gave rise to it.

Inside was the village dyer, Francois Vidal, who’d just gotten out of bed and started up the fire to warm the place and make himself a bit of porridge for breakfast. He was childless, a widower, and he lived alone. From the rafters of his one-room cottage hung the drying herbs, flowers and marsh weeds he used in his receipts — he was the only man in the region who could produce a bon teint of royal purple in lamb’s wool, employing his own mixture and mordant, and he was of necessity extremely secretive. Did his competitors want his receipts? Yes, they did. Did they spy on him?

He couldn’t have said for certain, but he wouldn’t have put it past them. At any rate, he went out to the yard, to the crude shed in which he kept his cow, so that he could feed and milk her, thinking to skim off the cream to complement his porridge. That was when he saw something — the dark streak of an animal — moving upright against the dun earth and the stripped backdrop of the trees.

He had no prejudices. He hadn’t heard the rumors from Lacaune or even from the next village over. And when his eyes adjusted and registered the image in his brain, he saw that this was no animal, but a human child, a boy, filthy, naked to the elements and in need. He held out his hand.

What ensued was a test of wills. When the boy didn’t respond, Vidal extended both his hands, palms up, to show he was unarmed, and he spoke to him in soft, coaxing tones, but the boy didn’t seem to understand or even to hear. As a child, Vidal had a half-sister who was deaf, and the family had evolved its own home signs to communicate with her, though the rest of the village shunned her as a freak; it was these signs that began to come back to him as he stood there in the cold, contemplating the naked child. If the boy was a deaf-mute, as it appeared, then perhaps he would respond to the signs. The dyer’s hands, stained with the residue of his trade, spoke in quick elegant patterns, but to no avail. The boy stood rooted, his eyes flitting past the dyer’s face to the house, the shed, the smoke that flattened and billowed against the sky. Finally, fearful of driving him off, Vidal backed slowly to the house, made a welcoming gesture at the door, and then stepped inside, leaving the door open wide in invitation.

Eventually, with the dyer bent over the hearth and the cow — Rousa — unmilked and lowing with a sound that was like the distant intermittent report of a meteorological event in the hills, the boy came to the open door and Vidal was able to get a good look at him. Whose child was this, he wondered, to be allowed to run wild like an animal, the filth of the woods ingrained in the very pores of his skin, his hair matted with twigs and burrs and leaf mold and his knees callused like the soles of his feet? Who was he? Had he been abandoned? And then he saw the scar at the child’s throat and knew the answer. When he gestured toward the fire, toward the blackened pot and the wheat porridge congealing within it, he was thinking of his dead sister.

Cautiously, one tentative step at a time, the boy was drawn to the fire. And just as cautiously, because he was afraid that any sudden movement would chase him through the door and back out into the fields, Vidal laid sticks on the hearth till the fire leapt up and he had to remove the pot, which he set on the fender to cool. The door stood open. The cow lowed. Using his hands to speak, the dyer offered the boy a bowl of porridge, fragrant with the steam rising from it, and he meant to fetch milk and pull the door shut, once he had his trust. But the boy showed no interest whatever in the food.

He was in constant motion, rocking back and forth on his feet, his eyes fixed on the fire. It came to Vidal that he didn’t know what porridge was, didn’t know a bowl or a spoon or their function either.

And so he made gestures, pantomiming the act of eating in the way of a parent with an infant, bringing the spoon to his lips and tasting the porridge, making a show of masticating and swallowing and even going so far as to rub his abdomen in a circular fashion and smiling in satisfaction.

The boy was unmoved. He simply stood there, rocking, fascinated by the fire, and the two of them might have stayed in position all day long if it weren’t for an inspiration that suddenly came to the old man. Perhaps there were simpler, ruder foods, he reasoned, foods of the forest and fields, that the child would take without prejudice, nuts and the like. He looked round him — he had no nuts. Nuts were out of season. But in a basket against the far wall there was a small quantity of potatoes he’d brought up from the root cellar to fry in lard with his evening meal. Very slowly, communicating with his body and his hands so as not to alarm the child, he got to his feet, and slowly — so slowly he might have been a child himself playing a game of statues — crossed the room to the basket.

He lifted the straw lid, and still pantomiming, held up the basket to display its contents.

That was all it took. In an instant the child was there, inches away, the wild odor rising from him like musk, his hands scrabbling in the basket till he was clutching every last potato in his arms — a dozen or more — and then he was at the fire, throwing them into the flames in a single motion. His face was animated, his eyes leaping.

Short, blunted, inarticulate cries escaped his lips. Within seconds, in the space of time it took Vidal to move to the door and pull it closed, the boy had reached into the coals to extract one of the uncooked potatoes, burning his fingers in the process. Immediately, as if he had no concept of what cookery involved, he began gnawing at it.

When it was gone, he reached for another and then another and the same sequence of events played out, only now the potatoes were blackened on the outside and hard within and his fingers visibly scarred.

Appalled, Vidal tried to instruct him, showing him the use of the fire irons, but the boy ignored him — or worse, stared right through him as if he didn’t exist. The dyer offered him cheese, bread, wine, but the child showed no interest, and it was only when he thought to pour him a cup of water from the pitcher on the table that the child responded. He tried at first to lap the water from the cup, but then he understood and held it to his lips until it was drained and he wanted more, which Vidal, as fascinated as if a fox had got up on two legs and come to join him at table, kept pouring until he was sated. After which, naked and filthy, the child pulled his limbs to his chest and fell into a deep sleep on the stones of the hearth.

For a long while, the dyer merely sat there, contemplating this apparition that had blundered into his life. He got up from time to time to feed the fire or light his pipe, but he didn’t attempt to do any work, not that day. All he could think of was his half-sister, Marie-Thérèse, an undersized child with a powerfully expressive face — she could say more with her face alone than most people with their tongues. She was the product of his father’s first marriage to a woman who had died of puerperal fever after bearing only this one damaged child, and his mother never accepted her. She was always last to be fed and first to receive the slap to the face or the back of the head when things went wrong, and she took to wandering off by herself, away from the other siblings, until one night she didn’t come back. He was eight or nine at the time, and so she must have been twelve or so. They found her body at the bottom of a ravine. People said she must have lost her way in the dark and fallen, but even then, even as a child, he knew better.

Just then Rousa bellowed and he started. What was he thinking, leaving her to burst like that? He got up quickly, slipped into his coat and went out to her. When he returned, the child was pinned against the far wall, huddled and afraid, staring at him as if they’d never encountered one another before. Things were out of place, the table overturned, candlesticks on the floor, all his painstakingly gathered and hoarded plants torn down from the rafters and scattered like drift. He tried to calm the boy, speaking with his hands, but it did no good — every movement he made was matched by a corresponding movement, the child keeping his back to the wall and maintaining the distance between them, rocking on his feet, ready to leap for the door if only he knew what the door was. And his jaws, his jaws seemed to be working. What was it? What was he eating, another potato? It was then that the dyer saw the naked tail of the thing dangling like a string of saliva from the corner of the boy’s mouth, and the boy’s yellowed teeth, chewing round the dun wad of fur.

If he’d felt sympathy, if he’d felt kinship and pity, now all the dyer felt was disgust. He was an old man, fifty-four years on this earth, and Marie-Thérèse had been dead nearly half a century. This was none of his affair. None of it. Cautiously, warily, all his senses on alert as if he’d found himself locked in a cage with a ravening beast, he backed toward the door, slipped outside and pulled it shut behind him.

Late that afternoon, as a cold rain pelted the streets of Saint-Sernin and fell hard over the countryside, the wild child was given up to science, and through science, to celebrity. After having rolled one of his big cast-iron dye pots across the yard and up against the door to secure it, Vidal had gone directly to lean-Jacques Constans-Saint-Estève, the government commissioner for Saint-Sernin, to make a report and give over responsibility for the creature immured in his cottage. The Commissioner, a man who traveled widely about the district, had heard the rumors from Lacaune and elsewhere, and he was eager to see this phenomenon with his own eyes. Here was a chance, he reasoned — if this creature wasn’t just some bugbear or an African ape escaped from a private menagerie — to put Rousseau’s notion of the Noble Savage to the test.

What innate ideas did he have? Did he know of God and Creation?

What was his language — the ur-language that gave rise to all the languages of the world, the language all men brought with them from Heaven? Or was it the gabble of the birds and the beasts? He could barely restrain himself. The light was fading from the sky and he’d had no dinner, but dinner was nothing compared to what this opportunity meant. He took Vidal by the arm. “Lead me to him,” he said.

By the time the Commissioner had concluded his audience with Vidal and hurried with him out into the rain to see this prodigy for himself, he was surprised to see people in the street, heading in the same direction as he. “Is it true, Citizen Commissioner?” people asked. “They’ve captured the wild child?”

“I hear,” someone else said, and there was a mob of them now, men, women and children, plodding through the rain to Vidal’s cottage, “that he has six fingers on each hand—”

“And toes,” another chimed in. “And he has claws like a cat to climb straight up a wall.”

“He leaps fifty meters in a bound.”

“Blood, he lives on blood that he sucks from the sheep at midnight.”

“Nonsense, nonsense”—one of the village women, Catherine Thibodeaux, appeared at his shoulder, hooded against the storm—“it’s only an abandoned child. Where’s the cure? Call out the cure.”

When they approached the yard, the Commissioner swung round furiously to hush them—“Stay back,” he hissed, “you’ll frighten him”—but the crowd had worked itself into a frenzy of fear and wonderment and they pressed forward like a flock heading to pasture. Everyone crowded round the door, pressing their faces to the windows, and if it weren’t for the impediment of the dye kettle they would have rushed into the room without thinking. Now they hesitated, their voices dropping to a whisper, while Vidal and the Commissioner shifted the kettle aside and stepped into the room, pulling the door fast behind them. The child was there, crouched before the fire, no different from how Vidal had left him, though he didn’t seem to be masticating anything at the moment. Thankfully.

What was strange, however, was that he didn’t look up, though certainly he must have been aware of the alien presence in the room and even of the credulous faces pressed to the windows.

The Commissioner was dumbstruck. This child — this thing — was scarred, hunched, filthy, and it gave off a stench of the barnyard, as wild and forlorn as the first upright creature created by God in His own image, the man Adam who was given dominion over the animals and named them in turn. But this was an animal, a kind of ape, the sort of degraded thing Linnaeus must have had in mind when he placed men and apes in the same order of being. And if there was any doubt, there was the fresh coil of its dung, gleaming on the rough planks of the floor.

The fire snapped and hissed. There was a murmur from the crowd pressed up against the windows. “Good God,” he exclaimed under his breath, and then, turning to the dyer, he put to him the only question he could manage, “Is it dangerous?”

Vidal, his house a shambles so that he was embarrassed in front of the Commissioner, merely shrugged. “He’s just a child, Citizen Commissioner, a poor abandoned child, flesh and blood, just like anyone else. But he’s unschooled. He doesn’t know porridge, doesn’t know a bowl, a cup, a spoon, doesn’t know what to do with them—”

Constans-Saint-Estève was in his early forties and dressed in the fashion of Paris as it was before the Revolution. He had a fleshy face and the pouting lips of an epicene. His back still pressed to the door, his eyes locked on the child, he whispered, “Does he speak?”

“Only cries and whimpers. He may be — I think he’s a deaf-mute.”

Overcoming his initial shock, the Commissioner crossed the room and stood over the boy a moment, murmuring blandishments.

His scientific curiosity had been re-aroused — this was a rare opportunity. A wonder, really. “Hello,” he said finally, bending at the knees and bringing his bland face into the child’s line of vision, “I am Jean-Jacques Constans-Saint-Estève, Commissioner for Saint-Sernin. And who might you be? What is your name?”

The child stared through him, as if he were insubstantial.

“Do you have a name?”

Nothing.

“Do you understand me? Do you understand French? Or perhaps some other language?” Judging from the coloration of the child’s skin, he might have been Basque, Spanish, Italian. The Commissioner tried out a greeting on him in the languages of these regions, and then, frustrated, clapped his hands together as loudly as he could, right in front of the child’s nose. There was no reaction whatever. The Commissioner looked to Vidal and the pale buds of the faces hung as if on a branch at the near window and pronounced, “Sourd-muet.”

It was then that the villagers could stand it no longer and began to push into the room, one at a time, until the place was crowded to the walls, people trampling the dried leaves and roots scattered across the floor, examining everything — trying, Vidal thought, to discover his secret methods and receipts, which made him uneasy in the extreme, made him suspicious and angry — and it was then that the child came to life and made a bolt for the open door. A cry went up and people leapt back as if a mad dog were amongst them; in a trice the child was out in the yard, in the rain, galloping on all fours for the curtain of trees at the edge of the field. And he would have made it, would have escaped again back into nature, but for two of the strongest men in the village, men in their twenties, great runners, who brought him to ground and wrestled him back to the open door of the dyer’s cottage. The child writhed in their grip, making a repetitive sound that rattled in his windpipe — uh-uh-uh-uh

— and snaking his head round to bite.

It was fully dark now, the light of the fire and a single candle falling through the open door to illuminate the scene. The Commissioner stood there in the doorway, looking down at the child for a long moment, and then he began to stroke the child’s face, pushing the hair back from his brow and out of his eyes so that everyone could see that he was a human child and no dog or ape or demon, and the stroking had the effect it would have on any sentient thing: the child’s breathing slowed and his eyes went distant. “All right,” the Commissioner said, “let him go,” and the men loosened their grip on his limbs and stepped back. For a moment the child just slumped there on the doorstep, glistening with wet and mud, his limbs thin as a cow’s shins, and then he took hold of the hand the Commissioner held out to him and rose quietly to his feet.

It was as if some switch had been turned off in the enfant’s inner apparatus — he came docilely, holding on to the Commissioner’s hand like a novice on the way to church, while the village followed in solemn processional. Along the way, the rain still lashing down and the streets a soup of mud, people tried to get close enough to touch the child, and they shouted out that he fed only on nuts and roots in the woods — and what would he eat now, a blanquette de veau? Boeuf bourguignon? Langouste? The Commissioner didn’t bother to answer, but he was determined to make his own experiment. First he would clothe the boy’s nakedness and then he would offer him an array of foods to see what he would take and in the process he would try to learn something of this prodigy that would benefit society and the understanding of mankind.

Once home, he shut the door on the villagers and instructed his servant to find a garment for the child, and then, while he ordered up his own dinner, he installed the child in the room he used as his study and offices. A fire was laid and the boy went directly to it. In the room were several chairs, a desk, shelves of legal volumes and volumes of natural history and philosophy, the Commissioner’s papers, a freestanding globe and a birdcage of wrought iron. Inside the cage was a gray parrot his late father had brought back from a voyage to Gambia thirty years earlier; her name was Philomene and she could ask, in penetrating tones, for grapes, cherries and nuts, comment on the weather and the state of inebriation of dinner guests and whistle the opening figure of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A minor. Excited by the prospect of examining the boy at his leisure, the Commissioner stepped out of the room only long enough to mollify his wife and give orders to have various foodstuffs brought to him; when he returned, the boy’s face was pressed against the bars of the cage and Philomene was vainly serenading him with the Mozart.

He took the boy gently by the hand and led him to the desk, where a servant had laid out a selection of foods, both raw and cooked. There was meat, rye and wheat bread, apples, pears, grapes, walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, potatoes, parsnips and a solitary orange.

Of all this, the child seemed only to recognize the acorns and potatoes, the latter of which he immediately threw into the fire, while cracking the acorns between his teeth and sucking the pulp from them. The potatoes he devoured almost instantly, though they were as hot as the coals themselves; bread meant nothing to him.

Again, and for many patient hours, the Commissioner tried speaking to the child, first aloud and then in dumbshow, but nothing would rouse him; he seemed no more aware than a dog or cat.

And no noise, not even the beating of a drum, affected him. Finally, after making sure the windows were secure and the doors latched, the Commissioner left the child in the room, snuffed the candles and went off to bed. Where his wife scolded him — what was he thinking bringing that savage thing into their house? What if he arose in the night and murdered them all? — and his two sons, Guillaume and Gérard, four and six respectively, informed him that they were too frightened to sleep in their own beds and would have to share his.

In the morning, he approached his study on silent feet, though he kept telling himself there was no need because the child was almost certainly deaf. He lifted the latch and peered into the room, not knowing what to expect. The first thing he saw was the child’s garment, a shift of gray cloth that had been forced over his head the previous night; it lay on the carpet in the center of the room beside a shining loop of excrement. The next thing was the child himself, standing in the far corner, staring at the wall and rocking back and forth on his feet and moaning as if he’d been wounded in some vital place. Then the Commissioner noticed several of his volumes of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière lying facedown on the floor, their leaves scattered to the wind. And then, finally, he noticed Philomene, or what was left of her.

That afternoon the wild child was sent to the orphanage at Saint-Affrique.

4

He was brought to Saint-Affrique in a fiacre, the jolting and swaying of which caused him a great deal of discomfort. Four times during the journey he became sick on the floor of the carriage and the servant Constans-Saint-Estève had sent along to accompany him did little to relieve his distress, other than daubing at the mess with a rag. The child was dressed in his gray shift, which was knotted tightly at the waist to prevent his removing it, he was barefooted and he’d been provided with a small sack of potatoes and turnips for his sustenance. The horses seemed to terrify him. He rocked on the seat and moaned the whole way. On arriving at the orphanage, he made a bolt for the woods, down on all fours and squealing like a rodent, but his guardian was too quick for him.

Inside the walls, it was apparent that he was no ordinary child.

The director of the orphanage — Citizen R. Nougairoles — observed that he had no notion of sitting at table or of relieving himself in the pot or even the latrine, that he tore at his garment as if the very touch of the cloth seared his skin and that he refused to sleep in the bed provided for him, instead curling up in a pile of refuse in the corner. When threatened, he used his teeth. The other children, curious at first, soon learned to give him his distance. Still, in the short time he was there, a mere two weeks, he did become acculturated to the degree that he seemed to appreciate the comforts of a fire on a bitter day and he extended his dietary range to include pease soup improved with hunks of dark bread. On the other hand, he displayed no interest whatever in the other orphans (or in anyone, for that matter, unless they were in immediate possession of the simple foods he liked to eat). People might as well have been trees for all he responded to them — except when they got too close, of course — and he had no conception either of work or recreation.

When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he crouched over his knees, rocking and vocalizing in a curious inarticulate way, but every moment he looked for his chance to escape and twice had to be chased down and forcibly restrained. Finally, and this was the one thing Nougairoles found most disturbing, he showed no familiarity with the forms and objects of holy devotion. The Director concluded that he was no imposter, but the real thing — Linnaeus’ Homo ferus in the flesh — and that the orphanage could hardly be expected to contain him.

In the meanwhile, both he and Constans-Saint-Estève wrote up their observations of the child and posted them to the Journal des débats, and from there the other Parisian periodicals took hold of the story. Soon the entire nation was mad for news of this prodigy from Aveyron, the wild child, the animal in human form.

Speculation galloped through the streets and echoed down the alleys. Was he Rousseau’s Noble Savage or just another aborigine? Or perhaps — thrilling conjecture — the loup-garou, or werewolf, of legend? Or was he more closely related to the orangutan, the great orange ape of the Far East, an example of which, it had been proposed, should be mated to a prostitute in order to discover its issue?

Two prominent and competing naturalists — Abbé Roche-Ambroise Sicard, of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, and Abbé Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre, professor of natural history at the Central School for Aveyron, located in Rodez — applied to take possession of the child in order to observe and record his behavior before it was further tainted by contact with society. Bonnaterre, being closer at hand, won out, at least in the short term, and he personally took charge of the boy at Saint-Affrique and transferred him to the school at Rodez. For the child, bewildered and aching only to get free of it all, it meant another fiacre, another assault of horses, another unfamiliar face. He was sick on the floor. He clutched the sack of turnips and potatoes to his side and would not let it out of his sight.

For the next several months, at least until the Minister of the Interior acted decisively in Sicard’s favor, Bonnaterre had the boy to himself. He assigned a servant to see to the boy’s corporal needs and then set about staging various experiments to gauge the child’s reactions and store of knowledge. Since it had been assumed that the child was deaf, all contact with him thus far had been in dumbshow, but Bonnaterre laid out a number of instruments, from the triangle to the drum to the bass viol, and led the child to them, playing on each one in succession as best he could. Beyond the windows it was a clear, bright, winter’s day. Bonnaterre’s servant — his gardener, to whom the boy had seemed at least minimally to relate, perhaps because of the smell of the earth about him — was stationed by the door to prevent the child’s escape and to discipline him if he should act out (and he did defeat all notions of modesty, pulling his smock up to the cincture at the waist in order to warm himself at the fire, for instance, and playing with his penis as if it were a toy soldier).

At any rate, Bonnaterre — a stern and imposing man with a face as flagrant as a ham against the pure white curls of his periwig — persisted for some time, beating at the drum, drawing the bow across the strings of the bass viol, clapping, shouting and singing till the gardener began to suspect he’d lost his mind. The child never reacted, never winced or smiled or turned his head at one plangent sound or another. But then the gardener, in his idleness, reached for a walnut from the bowl of them set on a sideboard at the rear of the room, out of sight of the boy, and applied the nut cracker to it with a sound barely discernible in the general racket fomented by his master, and — it was like a miracle — the boy’s head jerked round. In an instant, he was at the gardener’s side, snatching at the nuts; in the next, he was atop the sideboard, pounding the shells against the gleaming mahogany surface with the nearest thing that came to hand, a silver candlestick, as it turned out.

Despite the damage to the furniture, Bonnaterre was encouraged. The child was not deaf, not deaf at all, but rather his senses had been so attuned to the sounds of nature that any noise of human agency, no matter how strident or articulate, failed to impress him: there were no human voices in the wild, nor bass viols either. Creeping about the woods in an eternal search for food, he listened only for the fall of the apple or chestnut or the cry of the squirrel, or even, perhaps, on some miraculous level, for the minute vibrations sent out by the escargot as it rides along its avenue of slime. But if food was the child’s exclusive focus throughout his feral life, then how would he react now that food was abundant and his for the asking? Would he begin to develop an interior life — a prepositional life — rather than being exclusively fixated on exterior objects?

Bonnaterre pondered these questions, even as he observed the boy day by day and watched as he acquired rudimentary signs to make his desires understood, pointing to the water jug, for instance, when he was thirsty or taking his caretaker by the hand and leading him to the kitchen when he was hungry, there to point at one object or another. If he wasn’t immediately gratified he went to the floor, moving rapidly on hands and feet and dragging his posterior across the finished boards, at the same time setting up a withering deep-throated sort of howl that peaked and fell and rose again from nothing.

When he was given what he wanted — potatoes, walnuts, broad beans, which he shelled with amazing swiftness and dexterity — he ate until it seemed he would have to burst, ate more than any five of the other children could consume at a sitting, and then gathered up the leftovers in his gown and stole away to the courtyard, where he buried them for future reference, no different from a dog with a bone. And when he was fed with others he displayed no sense of courtesy or fairness, but took all the food to himself, whether by a bold snatch or the furtive gesture, with no thought for his fellows.

During the third week of observation he began to accept meat when it was offered, raw at first, and then cooked, and eventually he came to relish potatoes browned in oil in the pan — when the mood struck him he would go to the kitchen, take up the knife and the pan and point to the cabinet in which the potatoes and cooking oil were kept.

It was a rude life, focused on one thing only — on food — and Bonnaterre was able to recognize in him the origins of uncivilized humanity, untouched by culture, by awareness, by human feeling.

“How could he possibly be expected to have known the existence of God?” Bonnaterre wrote. “Let him be shown the heavens, the green fields, the vast expanse of the earth, the works of Nature, he does not see anything in all that if there is nothing there to eat.”

For the boy’s part, he began, very gradually, to adjust. His food came to him not from a hole in the earth or a chance encounter with carrion or the wild thing that was slower than he, but from these animals that had captured him, strange animals with heavy faces and snouts, with their odd white pelage and the hairless smooth second skin of their legs. He was with the one in charge of him at some point, the one all the others deferred to, and on an impulse he snatched at the man’s pelt, the whiteness there, the gleam of it, and was startled to see it detached from the man’s head and dangling from his own fingers. The man — the big flushed face, the veins like earthworms crawling up his neck — leapt from his seat with a cry and made to snatch the thing back, but the child was too quick for him, darting round the room and hooting over this thing, this hide that smelled of musk and the friable white substance that gave it its color.

Gabbling, the man came after him, and, terrified now, the child ran, ran to a kind of stone that was transparent and gave a view of the outdoors and the courtyard. This was glass, though he had no way of knowing it, and it was an essential component of the walls that imprisoned him. The man shouted. He ran. And the stone shattered, biting into his forearm with its teeth.

They put a bandage of cloth on his wound, but he used his own teeth to tear it off. Blood was a thing he knew, and pain, and he knew to avoid brambles, the hives of the wasps, the scaled stone of the ridges that shifted underfoot and cut at his ankles with mindless ferocity, but this was different, a new phenomenon: glass. A wound of glass. It puzzled him and he took up a shard of it when no one was looking and ran it over his finger till the pain came again and the blood showed there and he squeezed and squeezed at the slit of his skin to see the brightness of it, vivid with hurt. That night, just before supper, he tugged at the other man’s hand, the one who smelled of manure and mold, till the man took him out into the courtyard; the instant the door was opened he made a run for the wall and scaled it in two desperate bounds and then he was down on the far side and running, running.

They caught him again, at the foot of the woods, and he fought them with his teeth and his claws but they were bigger, stronger, and they carried him back as they always had and always would because there was no freedom, not anymore. Now he was a creature of the walls and the rooms and a slave to the food they gave him. And that night they gave him nothing, neither food nor water, and locked him in the place where he was used to sleeping at night, though he did not want to sleep, he wanted to eat. He chewed at the crack of the door till his lips bled and his gums tightened round the pain. He was wild no more.

When they took him to Paris, when the Minister of the Interior finally intervened on behalf of Sicard and gave instructions that the child should be brought north to the City of Light, he traveled through the alien countryside with Bonnaterre and the gardener who had acted as his caretaker all the while he was in Rodez. At first, he wouldn’t enter the fiacre — as soon as he was led out of the gates and saw it standing there flanked by the three massive and stinking draft horses with their stupendous legs and staring eyes, he tried to bolt — but Bonnaterre had foreseen the event and placed a cornucopia of potatoes, turnips and small, hard loaves on the seat, and his weakness led him to scramble up the step and retreat inside.

As a precaution against any further mischance, Bonnaterre had the gardener affix a lead to the cord round the child’s waist, a simple braid of rope, the other end of which was held loosely in the abbé’s hand as the public coach made its appointed stops and took on the odd passenger along the way. Was this a leash, such as might be used on a dog? It was an interesting question, one with pointed philosophical and humanitarian implications — certainly Bonnaterre didn’t want to call it a leash, nor did the gardener — and as the boy rocked on the seat and made sick on the floor, the abbé kept hold of it with the lightest touch. The coach heaved on its springs, the gardener made himself small, Bonnaterre looked straight ahead.

And when a blanched, imposing lady and her maid boarded the fiacre in a market town along the way, he went out of his way to assure them that the child was no threat at all and that the lead was solely for his own protection.

Nonetheless, when they stopped that evening at an inn along the way, the child (he was taller now and he’d put on weight, hardly a child any longer) did manage to create a scene. As the coachman held the door for the lady, the child gave a sly, sudden jerk at the lead, tearing it from the abbé’s hand; in the next moment, using the lady’s skirts as a baffle, he bounded down from the coach and lit out up the road in his curious, loping, lopsided gait, the leash trailing behind him. The lady, thinking she was being attacked, let out with a shriek that startled the horses into motion even while Bonnaterre and his servant clambered down to give chase and the hostler fought the reins. As can be imagined, the abbé was in no condition to be running footraces along the rutted dirt byways of a country lane, and he hadn’t gone twenty feet before he was bent double and gasping for air.

This time, however, and to everyone’s relief, the child apparently wasn’t attempting an escape, but instead stopped of his own accord no more than a hundred yards off, where a ditch of stagnant water ran along the road. Before they could prevent him, he threw himself down on his stomach and began to drink. The surface of the water was discolored with duckweed, strands of algae, roadside offal.

Mosquitoes settled on the child’s exposed limbs. His garment was soiled in the muck. Both Bonnaterre and the gardener stood over him, remonstrating, but he paid them no mind: he was thirsty; he was drinking. When he’d done drinking, he rose and defecated on the spot (another curiosity: he defecated while standing and squatted to micturate), dirtying the skirts of his gown without a second thought. And then, as if this weren’t enough, he made a snatch for something in the reeds and had it in his mouth before they could intervene — a frog, as it turned out, mashed to pulp by the time the gardener was able to pry it from his jaws.

After that, he came docilely enough to the inn, where he settled himself in the far corner of the room provided for him, gurgling and clicking over his sack of roots and tubers, to all appearances content and wanting the society of no one. But before long the villagers got wind of his arrival and crowded the inn for the rest of the night, straining to get a look at him — people clamoring at the doorway and scuffling in the halls, dogs yammering, the whole neighborhood in an uproar. He shrank into his corner, his face to the wall, and still the furor persisted till long after dark. And, of course, the closer he and his guardians got to the capital, where the influence of the newspapers was strongest, the bigger and more insistent the crowds grew. Despite himself, and despite the Minister of the Interior’s strict injunction to bring the child to Paris without harm or impediment, Bonnaterre couldn’t help gratifying the people along the way with at least a glimpse of the prodigy. And no, he didn’t feel at all like a circus crier or a gypsy sword-swallower or anything of the kind — he was a scientist presenting the object of his study, and if the pride of possession gave him an internal glow of special privilege and authority, well, so be it.

It might have been the contact with all those people or the breathing of the night air or the miasma that hung over the roadside ditches where he liked to drink, but the child fell ill with smallpox along the way and had to be confined in the back room of an inn for a period of ten days while he broke out in spots and alternately shivered and burned with the fever. Blankets were brought, the local physician was consulted, there was talk of purging and bloodletting, and Bonnaterre was in a state — it was his head that was on the line here. Perhaps literally. The Minister of the Interior, Lucien Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon, was an exacting man, and to present him with the mere corpse of a wild child would be like bringing him the hide of some rare creature from the African jungle, its anatomical features lost, its vibrant colors already faded. The abbé got down on his knees before the writhing, bundled, sweating form of the child, and prayed.

Drifting in and out of sleep, the child watched the walls fade away and the roof dissolve to present the stars and the moon and then he was capering through a meadow while the Midi shook the trees till they bent like individual blades of grass and he was laughing aloud and running, running. He saw back in time, saw the places where he’d gorged on berries, saw the vineyard and the grapes and the cellar where a farmer had stored his crop of potatoes, new-dug from the earth. Then there were the boys, the village boys, urchins, quick-legged animals, discovering him there in the forest and giving chase, pelting him with sticks and rocks and the hard sharp stabs of their cries, and then the men and the fire and the smoke. And this room, where the walls re-erected themselves and the roof came back to obliterate the sky. He felt hunger. Thirst. He sat up and threw off the bedclothes.

Three days later, he was in Paris, though he didn’t know it. All he knew was what he saw and heard and smelled. He saw confusion, heard chaos, and what he smelled was ranker than anything he’d come across in all his years of wandering the fields and forests of Aveyron, concentrated, pungent, the reek of civilization.

5

The Institute for Deaf-Mutes sprawled over several acres just across the boulevard Saint-Michel from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was formerly a Catholic seminary, which the revolutionary government had given over to Abbé Sicard for the training and advancement of the deaf and dumb. Employing a method of instruction in the language of signs he had adopted from his predecessor, De l’Epée, Sicard had become famous for the amazing transformations he’d wrought in several of his pupils, turning the all-but-hopeless into productive citizens who not only could articulate their needs and wants with perfect clarity but expound on philosophical issues as well. One of them, a well-made young man by the name of Massieu, was the cynosure of a number of Sicard’s public demonstrations of his pupils’ speaking and writing ability, in which the pupils answered questions written on cards by the audience, and he came to address a number of learned societies with confidence and dignity and in an accent not much worse than an educated foreigner’s. Even more astonishing, this young man, who’d come to the Institute as dumb as a stone, was eventually able to dine in company and entertain people with his own original bon mots, memorably defining gratitude as la mémoire du coeur and distinguishing between desire and hope by pronouncing that “Desire is a tree in leaf, hope is a tree in bloom, enjoyment is a tree with fruit.” And so, when the wild child was delivered up to Sicard by Bonnaterre, all of Paris awaited the result, the miracle that was sure to follow as the boy acquired the ability of language and the gift of civilization; it was hoped that one day he too would stand before an entranced audience and give shape to the thoughts and emotions he’d felt while living as an animal.

Unfortunately, things proved different.

After the initial flurry of excitement, after the crowds had dissipated and half the haut monde of Paris had trooped up the stairs of the Institute to observe him rocking in the corner of his room on the fifth floor, after he was brought to the chambers of the Minister of the Interior for a private interview (where he sat on his haunches in a corner and stared vacantly into the distance before relieving himself on the carpet), after the newspapers had recorded his every move and common citizens had gathered on street corners to debate his humanity, he was given over to neglect. Sicard, a man preoccupied with his more tractable pupils, the text of the book he was writing on the education of deaf-mutes and his duties as one of the founders of the Society of Observers of Man, examined the boy over the course of several days and pronounced him an incurable idiot — he wasn’t about to risk his reputation on a creature that recognized no signs whatever and hadn’t the sense or even the hygiene of a house cat. Thus, the child was abandoned again, but this time within the walls of the institution, where there was no one to look after him and where the other children made it their duty to chase, taunt and torment him.

He slunk about the corridors and grounds, moving from shadow to shadow as if afraid of the light, and whenever he heard the clamor of the deaf-mute students in the stairwell he ran in the opposite direction, ascending rapidly when they were below him, descending when they were above. Out of doors, he kept his back to the rough stone of the buildings, watchful and frightened, and when the others were released from their classes, he darted for the nearest tree. If he thought to escape during this period, he was frustrated not only by the fact that the keeper locked him in at night, but by the walls that delimited the grounds of the Institute — he could have scaled them in his efficient squirrel-like way, but what lay beyond the walls was the city, and he was a creature and prisoner of it now.

His only relief was in the privacy of his room, and even that was denied him more often than not because members of the scientific community continued to haunt the corridors of the Institute, one philosopher or naturalist after the other poking his head in the door or following him as he trotted the halls in his freakish sidelong gait or climbed up into the branches of the nearest tree to get away from the crush of people, people all around him where before there had been none. He took his food privately, in his room, hoarding it, and if he were to get wet — in a rainstorm or in the ornamental pond, where the other children delighted in cornering him — he had the disconcerting habit of drying himself with ashes from the hearth so that he looked like a ghoul haunting the halls. He tore the straw from his bed, refused to bathe, defecated beside the chamberpot as if in defiance. Twice, lashing out at mild Monsieur Guérin, the old man employed to maintain the grounds, he inflicted bite wounds.

Sicard and all his staff gave him up for hopeless. There was even talk of sending him to the Bicetre, where he would be locked away with the retarded and the insane, and it might have happened if it weren’t for the fact that it would have reflected so poorly on Sicard, who had, after all, insisted on bringing the child to Paris. By the fall of 1800, things stood at an impasse.

It was then that a newly fledged doctor from the Val-de-Grace Hospital came to work as medical officer at the Institute. His name was Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, he was twenty-five years old and he’d been schooled in Marseilles prior to his internship in Paris; he was given an apartment in the main building and a modest — very modest — salary amounting to sixty-six francs per annum. The first time he encountered the wild child was after he’d bandaged a bite wound on the forearm of one of the female students and learned that the boy who’d inflicted it was even then crouched in the denuded crown of the big elm that dominated the grounds, refusing to come down. Itard had, of course, heard rumor of the child — everyone in Paris had, and Sicard had mentioned him in passing as a failed experiment — but now, angry and disturbed, he marched out of the building and into the naked wind to confront him.

The grounds were deserted; the light was fading from the sky. A cold spell had settled over the city, slops freezing in the streets, citizens wrapping up in greatcoats and scarves even as their breath steamed around them. In his haste, Itard had forgotten his own coat — he was in his jacket only — and almost immediately a chill ran through him. He hurried across the brittle grass to where the elm stood silhouetted against the faint red streaks of the sky. At first he couldn’t see anything in the maze of slick black branches rattling composedly in the wind, but then a pigeon shot from the tree in a helter-skelter of wings and there was the boy, a white glow clinging like a fungus to the upper reaches of the trunk. He moved closer, his eyes fixed on the tree, until he stumbled over something, a shadow at his feet. When he bent to examine it, he saw that it was a simple shift of gray cloth, the boy’s garment, flung down like an afterthought.

So he was naked, the Savage was naked, up in the tree, and he’d bitten a girl. Itard almost turned his back on him — Let him freeze, he was thinking, the animal. If that’s what he wants, let him freeze.

But then his eyes went to the tree again and he saw with a sudden clarity, saw the boy’s neutral wedge of a face, the dark vacancy of his eyes, his pale splayed limbs, and he rode up out of his own body for a moment and inhabited the boy’s. What must it have been like to be abandoned, to have your throat cut, to be captured and imprisoned and without defense except to sink your teeth into the slowest and weakest of your tormentors? To throw off your clothes, indifferent to the cold? To cower and hide and hunger? Very slowly, very deliberately, Itard lifted himself up and began to climb.

The first thing Itard did was arrange for the groundskeeper’s wife, Madame Guérin, to take charge of the boy’s needs, to provide a woman’s touch, to mother him. Henceforth, the boy would take his meals in her apartments, along with Monsieur Guérin, whose attitude, Itard was sure, would soften toward the boy over time.

Madame Guérin was then in her forties. She was a squat, uncomplaining woman, formerly of the peasantry but now, like all members of the Republic, a citizen; she was broad of bosom and hip and wore her abundant, graying hair tied up in a knot on the crown of her head. Her own children — three daughters — lived with her sister in a cottage in Chaillot and she saw them when she could.

Itard himself — unmarried, utterly devoted to his deaf-mute charges and yet ambitious and eager to prove himself — saw something in the boy the others failed to notice. High in the branches of the elm, the city spread out beneath him and the flights of birds intersecting over the rooftops, he held out his hand against the wind, murmuring blandishments, coaxing, until the boy took it.

He didn’t attempt to pull the child to him or to apply any force or pressure — it was far too dangerous; any sudden movement could precipitate a fall — but he just held the hand offered to him, communicating his warmth to the boy in the most elemental way. After a while, the boy’s eyes settled on him, and he saw a whole world there, shuttered and excluded perhaps, but there nonetheless. He saw intelligence and need. And more: a kind of bargain in the making, a trust that sprang up automatically because they both knew that there was no one, not even the most agile of the deaf-mutes, who would have followed the Savage into that tree. When he finally let go of the boy’s hand, gesturing to the ground below, the boy seemed to understand him and followed him down the trunk of the tree, each movement, each hand-and foothold synchronized to his. At the base of the tree Itard held out his hand again and the boy clasped it and allowed himself to be led back into the big stone building and up the steps to his room and the fire Itard laid there. The two of them knelt on the rough planks of the floor for a long while, warming their hands as the wind lashed at the window and night came down like an axe.

Sicard gave his permission for Itard to work with the child.

What else could he do? If the neophyte failed to civilize the Savage, failed to teach him to speak and behave himself in society — and Sicard was certain he would fail — it was nothing to him. In fact, it was something of a relief, as he himself was no longer responsible, and yet if the Savage did somehow manage miraculously to acquire speech, it would reflect well on the whole enterprise; Sicard could even fleetingly envision the child, dressed in a proper suit of clothes, standing beside Massieu in an auditorium and wittily reflecting on his former life, speaking of raw tubers as la nourriture des animaux et des Belges or some such thing. But no, that would never happen.

And it was best to lay the blame on someone else’s shoulders. Still, he did manage to extract an annual stipend of five hundred francs from the government for the child’s care and education and the unique experiment Itard was prepared to carry out to put to the test the thesis propounded by Locke and Condillac: Was man born a tabula rasa, unformed and without ideas, ready to be written upon by society, educable and perfectible? Or was society a corrupting influence, as Rousseau supposed, rather than the foundation of all things right and good?

For the next five years Itard would devote himself seven days a week to finding out.

The boy took to the regime warily. On the one hand, he basked in the protection Madame Guérin and Itard gave him against the mob of deaf-mutes clamoring for his destruction and he relished the unending supply of food in the Guérins’ cabinet, and yet, on the other, he resisted with all his heart the doctor’s attempts to control him. He’d put on weight, grown softer, paler (once he’d come in from the woods and the burning effect of the sun, his skin was seen to be as fair as any other child’s), and he wanted only to crouch in a corner of his room and rock back and forth or sit by the edge of the pond and watch the light play over the water. And now, suddenly, here was this man with his insistent eyes and prodding nose haunting his every waking moment, pursuing him to his room to attack him there and even sitting down at table with him to interfere as he hoarded his food, the sausages he’d come to love and the potatoes fried in oil and the beans, the broad beans stewed into a pottage, the bread hot from the oven.

Every day, without relief, he was made to perform. And this was especially hard because for the first few weeks Itard had let him do as he pleased, taking him for long ambles in the park, allowing him to eat what and when he wanted and to hunker in his corner or curl up to sleep at any time of day or night, and that was a kind of heaven to the child because he was the leader, his whims were Itard’s whims, and with Itard at his side he could defy the deaf-mutes, especially one lean, quick whipcord of a boy who was forever creeping up on him to administer wet blows with his open hands or to wrestle him to the floor and press his weight into him till he couldn’t breathe.

Itard was there for him now, there to watch over him, but also, very slowly and subtly, to mold him to his will. On the morning of the first snowfall, when the whole institution was clothed in slumber and every sound damped by the steady, silent accumulation, the child woke with a frantic pounding joy and darted naked down the flights of stairs to the yard where he held his face to the sky and cried out at the descending swirl of pristine crystals and burrowed into the drifts, insensible to the cold, and no one attempted to stop him. The stone buildings loomed like cliffs calling down the storm out of the sky. Shapes formed and fragmented in the air, visions playing there in the courtyard for him and him alone. And then he looked up, sensing something, a presence, and there the man was, Itard, wrapped in his greatcoat and scarf, the dark curls of his hair whitening, his lashes, his eyebrows, the sharp projection of his nose.

The next day, the regime commenced and ever so gradually heaven receded.

Itard began by taking hold of the boy immediately after breakfast and giving him a long hot bath, a bath that lasted three hours and more, Madame Guérin heating pot after pot of water, the boy frolicking, splashing, diving, spouting, at play like any other child bathed in sustaining warmth and free to express himself, but there was a purpose here, a civilizing purpose, and the fact that the child was made clean and free of offensive odors was merely the ancillary benefit. No, what Itard was doing — and these baths continued every day for the next month — was sensitizing the Savage, making him aware of his body, his self, in a way the life of the animal could never have done. After the bath each day, another hour would be spent in massage, as Itard and Madame Guérin took turns rubbing his limbs, the small of his back, soothing him, giving him pleasure, allowing him to appreciate an interaction he’d never before experienced: he was being touched by one of his fellow creatures, and there was no fear in it, no violence. Sure enough, within the month, he would fall into a tantrum if the water wasn’t hot enough or the hands of his masseur sufficiently firm, and he began dressing himself without prompting, because now he felt the cold like any other domesticated creature and there was no going back. So too with his food. The Savage who had subsisted on raw roots and tubers, who had plucked potatoes from the fire and devoured insects and torn rodents with his teeth, turned up his nose at a plate of food that contained something he didn’t care for or that was contaminated by a single shining example of Madame Guérin’s silvered, flowing hair.

There were other things too that showed him coming awake in his senses. He learned to use a spoon to remove potatoes from a boiling pot, rather than simply thrusting in his oblivious fingers. He came to recognize himself in a hand mirror and to manipulate it so that it caught the light and tossed it from one corner of the room to the other. His fingers sought out the softness of Madame Guérin’s skirts and the delicious ripple of the corduroy of Itard’s suits. When he caught his first cold and sneezed, perhaps for the first time in his life, he was terrified and ran to his bed to bury himself beneath the counterpane, afraid that his own body was assaulting him. But then he sneezed again and again and before long, with Itard standing over him and murmuring reassurance, he came to anticipate the sneeze and ride its currents, exaggerating the sound of it, laughing, capering around the room as if propelled by an internal wind.

The next step — and here the boy began to chafe under his teacher’s demands — was the commencement of the second stage of the regime, designed to focus his vision and sharpen his hearing in the way that his taste and tactile sensitivity had been stimulated. To this point he had engaged in a kind of selective hearing, registering only the sounds connected with eating, the rattle of spoon in bowl, the hiss of the flames under the pot, the cracking of a nut, but human speech — aside from inflection, as when either Itard or the Guérins lost patience with his tantrums or attempted to warn him away from things that might injure him — failed to register. Speech was a kind of background music, no different from the incomprehensible twitter of the birds of the forest or the lowing of the cow or bark of the dog. Itard set out to train him first by imitation, reasoning that this was how infants acquired language, miming what was said to them by their parents. He broke the language down into simple vowel and consonant sounds, and repeated them over and over, in the hope that the boy would echo him, and always he held up objects — a glass of milk, a shoe, a spoon, a bowl, a potato — and named them. The boy’s eyes dodged away from his. He made no connection whatever between these rude noises and their referents and after months of study he could produce no sounds other than a kind of dull moaning and the laughter that awakened in him at the oddest and most frustrating moments. Still, he did react to the blunted speech of his deaf-mute tormenters — running from the noise of them, as he would have run from any startling sound in nature, a clap of thunder or the crash of a cataract — and one evening, when Itard had just about given up hope, he finally managed his first articulate expression.

It was in February, the sky stretched low and gray over the city, dinner stewing in a thousand pots, the eternal thumping and slamming and bellowing of the other students quietened both by the weather and the usual pre-prandial lull. Itard was seated in the kitchen of the Guérins’ apartment as Madame Guérin prepared the meal, quietly smoking and observing the boy, who was always at his most alert when food was the focus. It happened that while the boy was at the stove, overseeing the boiling of his potatoes, the Guérins, husband and wife, began an animated discussion of the recent death of one of their acquaintances in an accident involving a carriage.

Madame Guérin claimed it was the fault of the coachman — that he was negligent, perhaps even drunk — while her husband defended him. Each time she made a claim, he said, “Oh, but that’s different,”

and put in a counterclaim. It was that simple exclamation, that vowel sound, that “o” that caused the boy to turn his head, as if he could distinguish it from the rest. Later, when he was preparing for bed (and, incidentally, showing a marked preference for freshly laundered sheets and a featherbed to the nest of sticks and refuse and the cold planks he’d formerly insisted upon), Itard came to him to say goodnight and drill him on his vowels, thinking that the agency of sleep might somehow help impress the sounds on the empty tablet of the boy’s mind.

“Oh,” Itard said, pointing to the window. “Oh,” he said, pointing to the bed, to his own throat, to the round and supple sound hanging in the air.

To his amazement, from deep in the boy’s throat, the same sound came back at him. The boy was in his nightgown, tugging at the blankets. There was no show of ablutions or pretense of prayers to a non-conceptualized God; when the child felt sleepy, he retired to his room and plunged into the bed. But now, as he lay there, he repeated the sound, as if struck by the novelty of it, and Itard, excited, bent over him, repeating “oh, oh, oh,” until the child feel asleep.

It only seemed natural then, that in the morning, when the boy came to him, Itard called him by his new name, the one he’d suggested for himself, an august and venerable name borne proudly by any number of Frenchmen before and since, a name in which the accent fell heavily on the open second syllable: Victor. His name was Victor, and though he couldn’t pronounce the first part of it and perhaps didn’t even hear it and never would, he learned to respond to the second. He was Victor. Victor. After thirteen years on this earth, he was finally somebody.

6

It was around the time of his naming that Victor — or rather, Itard, on Victor’s behalf — received an invitation to attend the salon of Madame Récamier. This was a great opportunity, not only for Victor, whose cause could be promoted amongst the most powerful and influential people in France, but for Itard too, who, despite himself, had unrealistic social expectations, and like any other man, yearned for recognition. Madame Récamier was then twenty-four years old, a celebrated beauty and wit, wife of a wealthy banker three times her age and doyenne of a chateau in Clichy-la-Garenne, just outside the city; anyone who was anyone came there to pay her homage and to be seen. Accordingly, Itard bought himself a new jacket and had Madame Guérin make Victor a suit of clothes replete with a high-collared shirt, waistcoat and cravat, so that he looked like a gentleman in miniature. For a full week before the date of the salon, Itard devised various games and stratagems to teach Victor how to bow in the presence of a lady, with mixed results.

On the evening of the party they hired a carriage, Victor by now having lost his fear of horses to the extent that he stuck his head out the window and shrieked with glee the whole way, startling pedestrians, gendarmes and dogs alike, and proceeded through a cold rain to Clichy-la-Garenne. At first things seemed to go well, the bon ton of Paris making way for the doctor and his charge, the former savage who was now dressed and comporting himself like any other boy of thirteen, though Victor failed to bow to anyone, let alone his hostess, and persisted in trotting from one corner of the grand hall to the other, smearing his face with whatever foods he was able to find to his liking, the beaded eggs of fish presented on wafers of bread, fungus that had been stuffed, breaded and fried in hot oil, the remains of songbirds skewered nose-to-anus.

Madame Récamier gave him the seat of honor beside herself and even fussed over Itard a bit, trying to draw him out for the benefit of her guests, hoping he might, like a circus trainer, persuade Victor to show off some trick or another. But Victor didn’t show off any tricks.

Victor didn’t know any tricks. Victor was mute, unable — or unwilling — even to pronounce his own name, and he wasn’t in the least susceptible to Madame Récamier’s legendary beauty and celebrated eyes. After a while she turned to the guest seated on her other side and began to regale the table at large with an involved story concerning the painter who had recently done her portrait in oils, how he’d made her sit frozen in a single position and wouldn’t even allow one of the servants to read aloud to her for fear of breaking her concentration. The tedium she’d endured. The suffering. What a beast this painter was. And at a gesture from her everyone looked up and there it was, like a miracle, the very portrait of the inestimable Madame Récamier — couchant, her feet tantalizingly bare and her face wearing a dignified yet seductive look — displayed on the wall behind them. Itard was transported.

And he was about to say something, searching for the right words, something charming and memorable that would rise above the self-satisfied gabble of his fellow diners, when a crash, as of priceless statuary upended, silenced the table.

The sound had come from the garden, and it was followed, sharply, by a second crash. Itard looked to Madame Récamier, who looked to the vacant seat beside her even as one of the notables at the far end of the table cried out, “Look, the Savage — he’s escaping!”

In the next moment, the whole party was thrown into turmoil, the men springing up to burst through the doors in pursuit, the ladies gathering at the windows and fanning themselves vigorously to keep from fainting with the excitement of it all, the servants fluttering helplessly round the vacated places at the table and the hostess herself trying to look as if this were all part of the evening’s entertainment. Itard, mortified, threw back his chair in confusion, the napkin clutched like a lifeline in his right hand. He was immobi-lized. He didn’t know what to do.

By the time Itard came to his senses, Victor was zigzagging back and forth across the lawn, pursued by a dozen men in wigs, frilled shirtfronts and buckled pumps. Worse, the boy was divesting himself of his garments, flinging the jacket from his shoulders, tearing the shirt down the middle, running right out of his shoes and stockings. A moment later, despite the hot baths, the massages and the training of his senses, he was as naked to the elements as he’d been on the day he stepped out of the woods and into the life of the world — naked, and scrambling up the trunk of one of Madame Recamier’s plane trees like an arboreal ape. Itard moved through the doors as if in a trance, the shouts of prominent citizens — including the august General Jean Moreau, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, future king of Sweden and Norway, and old Monsieur Récamier himself — ringing in his ears. With the whole party looking on, he stood at the base of the tree, pleading with Victor to come down, until finally he had to remove his own jacket and begin climbing.

The humiliation of that evening stayed with Itard for a long while, and though he wouldn’t have admitted it, it played a role in his attitude toward his pupil in the ensuing weeks and months of his training. Itard cracked down. No longer would he allow Victor to get away with the tantrums that too often put an end to his lessons, no longer would he tolerate any deviance from civilized behavior, which most emphatically meant that Victor would henceforth and strictly keep his clothes on at all times. And there would be no more tree climbing — and no more forays into society. Society could wait.

At this stage in Victor’s education, in addition to constantly drilling him on his vowels, Itard began to employ the method Sicard had used in training his deaf-mutes to read, write and speak. He began by having Victor attempt to match everyday objects — a shoe, a hammer, a spoon — with simple line drawings of them, the idea being that once Victor had mastered the representation, then the symbols that depicted them in language, the words, could be substituted for the drawings. On the table in Victor’s room, Itard laid out a number of these objects, including the key to Madame Guérin’s food closet, an article of which the boy was especially enamored, and then fastened the drawings to the opposite wall. When he pointed to the drawing of the key, for instance, or the hammer, he demonstrated to Victor that this was the object he wanted.

Unfortunately, Victor was unable to make the connection, though Itard persisted, perfecting his drawings and drilling the boy over and over while simultaneously pronouncing the appropriate word: “La clé, Victor, bring me la clé.” Occasionally, Victor did bring the correct object, but just as often, despite a thousand trials, he brought the hammer when the key was wanted or the shoe when it was the spoon his teacher had requested.

Itard then hit on the idea of having his pupil manually match the objects to the drawings, a less complex task surely. He began by arranging each of the articles on a hook beneath the corresponding drawing. He and Victor sat on the bed in Victor’s room and studied the arrangement — key, hammer, spoon, shoe — until Victor had had time to associate each object with the drawing above it, then he rose, gathered up the objects and handed them to Victor to put up again.

For a long while, Victor merely looked at him, his eyes soft and composed, then he got to his feet and put the objects back in their proper order. He was able to do this repeatedly, without hesitation, but when Itard changed the sequence of the drawings, Victor continued to place the objects in their original order — he was relying on his spatial memory alone. Itard corrected him, over and over, and just as often, no matter how Itard arranged the drawings or the objects, Victor placed the things where they had originally been, always relying on memory. “All right,” Itard said to himself, “I will complicate the task.” Soon there were a dozen articles, then fifteen, eighteen, twenty, so many that Victor could no longer remember the order in which they had been arrayed. Finally, after weeks of drills, of firmness, of pleading, of insistence, Itard was gratified — or no, he was delighted, ecstatic — to see his pupil making careful comparison of drawing and object and ultimately mastering the task at hand.

Next, it was the words. Itard went back to the original four objects, set them on their hooks, printed the signifiers for each in clear block letters — LA CLE, LE MARTEAU, LA CUILLER, LE

SOULIER — and removed the drawings. Nothing. It was just as before — Victor made no connection whatever between what must have seemed to him random markings and the tangible things on the hooks. He was able only to arrange the items from memory, and no amount of study, no number of repetitions, could enlighten him.

Weeks passed. Victor began to balk at the drills. Itard persisted.

Nothing happened. Puzzled, he went to Sicard.

“The boy is congenitally infirm,” the abbé said, sitting behind his great mahogany desk and stroking one of the cats that roamed the Institute’s grounds. “He is, I am sorry to say, an idiot — and not an idiot because he was abandoned but a true idiot, a cretin, and it was his idiocy that was the cause of his abandonment.”

“He’s no idiot, I can testify to that. He’s making progress. I see it in his eyes.”

“Yes, and imagine the parents, ignorant peasants, a succession of squalling and filthy children clinging to their knees and little or nothing in the pot and they have this child — this Victor, as you call him — who cannot speak or respond normally. Of course they abandon him. It’s a sad fact of life, and I’ve seen it time and again with my deaf-mutes.”

“With all due respect, Abbé, he is no idiot. And I’ll prove it. Just give me time.”

Sicard leaned down to release the cat, a spoiled fat thing which was the brother or uncle or perhaps even the father (no one could remember) of the nearly identical one Madame Guérin kept in her apartments. When he sat back up again, he leveled his eyes on Itard and observed, in a quiet voice, “Just as you did at Madame Récamier’s, I suppose?”

“Well, I—” This was a low blow, and Itard wasn’t prepared for it.

“That was unfortunate, I admit, but—”

“Unfortunate?” The abbé tented his hands before him. “The boy is an embarrassment — to you, to me, to the Institute and all we’ve accomplished here. Worse: he’s an insult.” He lowered his voice to a whisper: “Give it up, Itard. Give it up while you can — it will destroy you, can’t you see that?”

But Itard wouldn’t give up. Instead, he abandoned Sicard’s method and went all the way back to the beginning. As he saw it, Victor’s problem was one of perception — and it went deeper, far deeper, than in any of the Institute’s deaf-mutes, whose visual acuity had been honed as an adaptation to their disability so that the thing and its representation in symbols was readily apparent to them.

They had little difficulty in discerning the fine gradations in contour that separate one letter from another, a printed b from an h, an l from a t, and once they recognized the system they were able to appreciate it in all its variations. Victor, on the other hand, simply did not see the letters of the words because he couldn’t distinguish simple shapes. And so, Itard came up with the idea of training Victor to recognize basic figures — cardboard triangles, circles, squares, parallelograms — and to match them to the spaces from which they’d been cut. At first, Victor took the new regime as a kind of game, and he was easily able to fit the pieces back in the holes, but then Itard, excited by the boy’s progress, made the drills increasingly complicated, varying the shapes, colors and sequences of the pieces until finally, predictably, Victor revolted.

Imagine him. Imagine the wild child in his suit of clothes with his new name and his newly acquired love of comfort, with the mother-figure Madame Guérin had come to represent there to comfort and caress him and the demanding father, Itard, filling his every waking moment with impossible, frustrating tasks as in some tale out of the Brothers Grimm, and it’s no surprise that he broke down, that his initial spirit, his free spirit, his wild spirit, reasserted itself. He wanted only to roam in some uncontained place, to sleep in the sun, to put his head in Madame Guérins lap and sit at the table and eat till he burst, and yet every time he looked up, there was Itard, the taskmaster, with his fierce eyes and disapproving nose.

And more, and worse: there were changes coming over his body, the hormonal rush of puberty, coarse hair sprouting under his arms and between his legs, his testes descending, his appendage stiffening of its own accord, morning and night. He grew confused. Anxious.

Angry.

The blowup came on a fine spring afternoon, all of Paris redolent with the perfume of lilac and lily, the southern breeze as soft and warm as a hand laid against a cheek, the pond on the Institute’s grounds giving rise sp ntaneously to ducklings, whole fleets of them, even as the deaf-mutes capered over the lawns, squealing and whinnying in their high, strained, unnatural voices.

Itard had devised an especially complex configuration of shapes and cutouts, posters nailed up on the walls and three-dimensional figures spread across the table, and he could see that Victor was growing frustrated. He was feeling frustrated himself — this morning, like a hundred others before it, offering up hope in such niggardly increments that it seemed as if the glaciers of the Alps and Pyrenees would meet before Victor could learn to perform a task any four-year-old would have mastered in a minute.

The shapes wouldn’t cohere. Victor backed away, flung himself sullenly on the bed. Itard took him by the arm and forced him to stand and confront the problem, just as he’d done over and over again all morning long, the grip of his iron fingers on the yielding flesh of the boy’s upper arm as familiar to both of them as breathing in and breathing out. But this time, Victor had had enough. With a violence that startled them both, he snatched his arm away and for one suspended moment made as if to attack his teacher, his teeth bared, fists raised in anger, until he turned on the hated objects — the spheres, pyramids and flat geometric figures — and tore them to pieces. He raged round the room, ducking away from his teacher with the animal dexterity that had yet to abandon him despite the weight he was putting on, heaving the scraps out the open window, then rushing to the fireplace to fling ashes round the room and ripping at the sheets of the bed with his teeth until they were shredded, and all the while Itard trying to wrestle him down. Finally, ululating in a new oppressive voice that might have been the call of some carrion bird, Victor threw himself on the floor and fell into convulsions.

The convulsions were authentic — the eyes sunk back in the boy’s head, his teeth gnashing, tongue bloodied — but they were self-generated for all that, and Itard, who’d witnessed this scene innumerable times in the past, lost control himself. In a flash, he was on the boy, jerking him up off the floor and dragging him to the open window — shock treatment, that was what he needed, a force that was greater than he, implacable, irresistible, a single act of violence that would tame him forever. And here it was, ready to hand. Clutching him by the ankles, Itard thrust the boy through the frame of the open window and dangled him there, five long stories from the ground. Victor went rigid as a board, the convulsions dissolved in the terror of the moment. What must he have thought?

That after all the kindness and blandishments, all the food, warmth and shelter, his captors — and this man, this man in particular who had always forced these strange, useless labors on him — had finally shown their true colors. That his teacher was in league with Madame Guérin, that they’d softened him in order to destroy him as surely as the deaf-mutes would have done if they’d had their way, and before them the merciless boys of the villages at the edge of the forest. He’d been betrayed. The ground would rush to meet him.

For those few minutes, Itard didn’t care what the boy was feeling. All the pain and humiliation of the scene at Madame Récamier’s came rushing back to him, all the endless wasted hours, the unceasing contest of wills, Sicard’s skepticism, the sharpened blade of the world’s ready judgment and failure waiting in the wings.

Victor whimpered. He wet his trousers. A pigeon, disturbed on its roost, let out a soft flutter of concern. And then, after all the blood had rushed to Victor’s face, after the sky seemed to explode across the horizon and close back up on itself in a black ball and the deaf-mutes began to gather below, pointing and shouting, Itard tightened his grip and hauled the boy back into the room.

He didn’t lay him on the bed. Didn’t set him in the chair or back on the floor. He held him up until Victor’s muscles flexed and he was able to stand on his own. Then, very firmly and without hesitation, he made the boy gather up what scraps of cardboard remained, and recommenced the lesson.

After that excoriating afternoon, Victor seemed to come round. He still balked at his lessons, but not as often — or as violently — as before, and Itard had only to motion to the window to subjugate him completely. There were no more tantrums, no convulsions.

Dutifully, his shoulders slumped and head bowed, Victor did as he was told and applied himself to his lessons, gradually acquiring a modicum of skill at matching the geometric shapes to their receptacles. At this point, Itard decided to move forward, attempting to teach him the alphabet through the agency of both his tactile sense and his burgeoning ability to make visual distinctions; to this end, he created a sort of board game in which there were twenty-four compartments, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, and twenty-four corresponding metal cutouts. The idea was for Victor to remove the cutouts from the compartments and then replace them properly, which he seemed able to do right from the beginning with relative ease. It was only by observing him closely, however, that Itard saw that Victor hadn’t learned the letters at all, but was instead painstakingly setting aside the cutouts and simply reversing the order in which he’d removed them. And so Itard complicated the game, as he’d done with the representational drawings, until Victor could no longer memorize the order of the letters but had to concentrate on matching the shapes. Which he finally did. Victoriously.

This led, shortly thereafter, to Victor’s pronouncing his first word aloud. It came about that one late afternoon, Madame Guérin had poured out a bowl of milk for Sultan, her pampered cat, and then a glass for Victor while the metal letters of the alphabet happened to be laid out on the table in her kitchen, and Itard, always looking for an opportunity of instruction, took up the glass before Victor could reach for it and manipulated four of the cutouts to spell the word for milk: 1-a-i-t. Pronouncing it simultaneously—“Lait, lait”—he scrambled the letters and pushed them back across the table to Victor, who immediately arranged them to spell: t-i-a-1.

“Good, Victor, very good,” he murmured, realizing his mistake—

Victor had seen the word upside down — and quickly rearranging the letters. Again the exercise, and this time Victor spelled the word properly. “Lait, lait,” Itard repeated, and Madame Guérin, at the stove now, took it up too, a chant, a chorus, a panegyric to that simple and nourishing liquid, all the while pointing from the letters on the table to the milk in the glass and back again to his lips and tongue. Finally, with effort, because he’d come to relish milk as much as the cat did, Victor fumbled out the word. Very faintly, with his odd intonation, but clearly and distinctly, he echoed them: “Lait.”

Itard was overjoyed. Here it was, at long last, the key to unlock the boy’s mind and tongue. After praising him, after losing all control of himself and pulling Victor to him for a rib-rattling hug and pouring him a second and third glass of milk till his lips shone with a white halo, Itard ran off to the abbé’s office to report this coup de foudre, and Sicard, for all his dubiety, withheld judgment. He could have remarked that even cretins can pronounce a few simple words, that infants of eighteen months can mouth “mama” and

“papa,” but instead he simply said, “Congratulations, mon frère. Keep up the good work.”

The doctor went to bed happy that night and the next night and the night after that, and he remained happy through his mornings and afternoons until he took his dinner with Victor and the Guérins on the third evening after his pupil’s triumph and Victor exclaimed

“Lait!” when Madame Guérin poured him a glass of water, cried

“Lait!” when she sliced him a piece of lamb, and “Lait, lait, lait!”

when she set his potatoes, hot in their jackets, on the plate before him.

Was the doctor disappointed? Was he crushed, annihilated in the deepest fortress of his spirit? Was he rehearsing the abbé’s words—“Give it up; it will destroy you”—over and over again? Yes, of course he was — how could he not be? — and he showed it in his face, in his gestures, in his attitude toward his ward and pupil, angry at the sight of him, of his thin wrists and too-big head and the flab beginning to accrue at his waist and in his cheeks and breast and under his chin even as Victor matched the metal cutouts to their compartments, singing out “Lait!” every time he succeeded.

Itard could never be sure if it was his own antagonism and harshness in those days following his disappointment that prompted the first major crisis in Victor’s sojourn at the Institute, but when he came up the five flights of stairs in the morning to find the boy’s bed empty, he blamed himself. Victor was not at the Guérins’, not in Sicard’s offices or mooning over the pond, and a search of the deaf-mutes’ dormitories and of the grounds, extending even to the farthest walls, proved futile. Once again, as if he’d been a figment of the collective imagination, the wild child had vanished.

7

Outside in the dark, beyond the gates of the Institute, Victor was adrift. There was too much noise. There were too many people.

Nothing seemed familiar, nothing seemed real. The sky was jagged, unrecognizable, the city a flower carved of stone, blooming under a moonless spring night, its petals radiating out in a thousand alleys and turnings and dead ends. Something had driven him out of his bed, down the flights of stairs and then across the grounds and up through the gates and into the streets, but he couldn’t remember what it was. Some slight, some injury, the continuing and immitigable frustration of trying to please this man with his fierce grip and seething eyes — yes, and something else too, something he couldn’t take hold of because it was inside of him, beating with the pulse of his blood.

Earlier, just after dinner, one of the deaf-mutes (not like him, a she, a new inmate arrived that morning with hair that hung down her back and a screen of heavy folded cloth concealing her legs and the other thing that was there, the potent physical mystery he could divine in the way he could sense the presence of an animal in a silent glen or sniff out the sodden secret pocket of earth that gave up the gift of a mole or truffle) had come to him in the hallway outside his room and held out her hand. She was offering him something, a sweet thing, small and sweet from the oven, and he didn’t like such things and slapped it from her hand. There it was, on the floor, between them. She drew in her breath. Her face changed. And suddenly her eyes sprang at him, her arms jerking and her elbows knifing as her fingers bent and flexed and contorted themselves in some mad show, and he backed away from her. But when she reached down to retrieve the sweet, he came at her from behind and put his hands there, in the place where her limbs joined beneath the cloth, and he didn’t know what he was doing or why he did it.

And yet there were repercussions. The she jumped as if she’d been stung, whirling round at the same time to rake her nails across his face, and he didn’t understand and struck back at her and suddenly she was making the noise of an animal, a rising complaint that echoed down the hallway till the man appeared, his jacket askew and his face rigid with the expression Victor knew to be dangerous, and so he shrank away even as the man took hold of him roughly and made his voice harsh and ugly till it too rang out from the stone. This booming, this racket, and what was it? The teeth clenched, the parceled sounds flung out, each syllable a blow, and why, why? There was the physical pain of that enraged grip, and any creature would have felt it, any dog grabbed by the collar, but that was as nothing to the deeper pain — this was the man who demanded everything of him and who hugged him and petted him and gave him good things to eat when he complied, and to see him transformed was a shock. Victor remembered the window — and the closet into which he’d been thrust whenever he balked in those first months of his training — and he let himself go limp even as the man dragged him through the door, across the floor of his room and into the closet. And so, when it was time for bed, when the man’s footsteps approached and the key turned in the lock and the closet door was pulled open, Victor would not make it up with him, would not hold his arms out for a hug as he’d done so many times before, and when the night came he hid by the gates till he heard the stamp and shudder of the horses and the chime of the wheels and the gates swung open to release him.

At first, in the freedom of the night, he’d felt supercharged with excitement, and he stole away from the walls with a sense of urgency, something in the smell of the air, polluted as it was, bringing him back to his old life when everything was untainted and equally divided between the kingdoms of pleasure and pain. He kept to the shadows instinctively, the noise of the carriages like thunder, people everywhere, emerging from the mist like specters, shouting, crying, their clogs beating at the stones, and dogs — how he hated them — making their racket in the alleys and snarling behind the fences. This new energy, this new feeling, drove him on. He walked till his shoes nagged at his feet and then he walked out of them and left them standing there in an alley behind him, two neat leather shoes, one set in front of the other in mid-step as if he’d been carried off by some great winged thing. A light rain began to fall. He turned one way to avoid a group of men bawling in their rumbling, low, terrible voices, and then he was running and he turned another way and was lost. The rain quickened. He huddled beneath a bush and began to shiver. All the urgency had gone out of him.

When he woke, the night had gone silent but for the hiss of the rain in the trees along the street and the trill of it in the gutters. He didn’t know where he was, didn’t know who he was, and if someone had stooped down under the bush and called him Victor — if Madame Guérin in her apron had appeared at that moment with her soft face and pleading hands and called him to her — he wouldn’t have recognized his name. He was cold, friendless, hungry. Just as he’d been before, in the woods of La Bassine and the high cold plain of Roquecézière, but it was different now because now he felt a hunger that wasn’t for food alone. He shifted position, tried to draw his wet clothes around him as best he could. One side of his face was smeared with filth where he’d lain in the mud. The soles of both feet were nicked and bleeding. He shivered till his ribs ached.

At first light, a man in uniform saw him curled beneath the bush and prodded him with the glistening toe of a boot. He’d been somewhere else, dislocated in his dreams, and he sprang up in a panic. The man — the gendarme — spoke something, the quick, harsh words like a drumbeat, and when he made a snatch for Victor’s arm, he was just half a beat too slow. Suddenly Victor was running, the paving stones tearing at his feet, and the gendarme ran too, till the rain and the mist intervened and Victor found himself sitting beneath a tree overlooking the rush and chop of the moving river.

Somewhere else, not half a mile distant, Itard and the Guérins roamed the streets, stopping pedestrians to inquire of him — Had anyone seen him, a boy of fifteen, his sharp nose, clipped hair the color of earth, in blue shirt and jacket, the wild boy, the Savage escaped from the Institute for Deaf-Mutes? People just stared. Itard turned away from them, calling “Victor, Victor!” with a ringing insistence, even as Madame Guérin’s voice grew increasingly plaintive and hollow.

The city awoke and arose. Fires were lit. Raw dough fell into hot oil, eggs cracked, pike lost their heads, civilization progressed. Victor sat there in the rain, running his hands over his body, over the stiffening thing between his legs and the heavy roll of flesh round his midsection, the miracle of it, and then he pushed himself up and followed his nose across the street to where an open doorway gave onto a courtyard blossoming with the scent of meat in a pan. The rain slackened here, caught and held fast by the eaves. There was pavement underfoot. He could see a woman moving behind a window that was cracked an inch or two to let in the air, and he went to the window and stood watching her as she tended the meat and the pan and the odor of it rose up to communicate with him. It took a moment before she saw him there, his face smeared with mud, his hair wet and hanging, his black eyes fixed on her hands that spoke to the pan on the stove and the licking of the fire and the rhythm of the long two-pronged fork. She said something then, her face flaring in anger, her voice growling out, and in the next moment she vanished, only to reappear at a door he hadn’t seen. There were more words flung out into the rain, and then there was the dog, all teeth and clattering nails, and Victor was running again.

But four legs outrun two, and just as he made the street the animal’s jaws closed on him, on his right leg, in the place where the buttock tapers into the long muscle beneath it. The animal held on, raging in its own language, and he knew he had to stay upright, knew he had to fight it from the vantage of his height and not give in and fall beneath its teeth. They jerked there, back and forth, the animal releasing its grip only to attack again and again, the blood bright on the black ball of its snout, and he beat at the anvil of its head with both lists until something fell away inside him and his own teeth came into play, clamping down on the thing’s ear. Then the snarls turned to pleas, to a high, piping, bewildered protest that was no domesticated sound at all, and he held tight to the furious jerking anvil till the ear was his and the dog was gone. He tasted hair, tasted tissue, blood. People stared. A man came running.

Someone called out to God as his witness, a common-enough phrase, but Victor knew nothing of God or of witness either. For the first time in a long buried while, he chewed without a thought for anything else but that, and he was chewing still as he turned on his heel and trotted up the street in his torn pants, his own blood hot on the back of his thigh.

He thought nothing. He didn’t think of Madame Guérin or the food locker or of Itard or the she who’d offered him the sweet thing in the bleak familiar hallway outside the door of his room, and he didn’t think of the room or the fire or his bed. Walking, he felt the pain in his feet and this new fire burning in the flesh of his thigh, and he limped and shuffled and stayed as close to the walls as he could. Everything that had come before this moment had been erased. He kept walking round the same block, over and over, his head down, shoulders slumped, in search of nothing.

Itard had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep when one of the deaf-mutes who’d been sent out to scour the neighborhood came to him with a pair of scuffed leather shoes in hand. The boy — he was Victor’s age, lean, clear-eyed, his hair cut too close to the scalp by the Institute’s incompetent barber — was fluent in the manual language of the deaf-mutes and was able to tell Itard where he’d found the shoes and to lead him there and even demonstrate in which direction they’d been pointed. Itard felt stricken. He felt sick. The shoes — he turned them over in his hand — were worn unevenly along the inside seam where Victor’s lurching, pigeon-toed gait punished the leather. There was no doubt. These shoes, these artifacts, were as familiar to him as his own boots.

It was raining, the cobblestones glistening as if they’d been polished. Pigeons huddled on the windowsills and under the eaves.

Itard bent to touch the spot the boy indicated and then looked off down the dripping alley to where the walls seemed to draw together in the distance. He was afraid suddenly. The experiment was over.

Victor was gone for good.

Even as he got to his feet and hurried down the alley, the deaf-mute at his side, he pictured Victor passing swiftly through the city, guided by his nose and ears, throwing off his suit of clothes like a yoke, working his way up along the bank of the Seine till the fields opened around him and the trees went dense in the ravines. He didn’t stop to think what the boy would eat or that he was dependent now and grown heavy with surfeit and luxury, but thought only of Victor’s eyes and teeth and how he would stoop to snatch up a frog or snail and crush it between his jaws — yes, and how well had all the eternal hours of exercises, of matching shapes and letters and forming vowels deep in the larynx prepared him for that? It was nothing. Life was nothing. He — Itard — for all his grand conception of himself and his power and his immutable will, was a failure.

A moment later they emerged from the alley and were back out on a wet, twisting street crowded with people and the baggage they hauled and carried and pressed to their bodies as if each loaf or sausage or block of paraffin was as vital as life itself, no chance of finding him here, no chance, and he thought of Victor’s room, empty, and in the same moment that he was struck by the pang of his loss he felt a clean swift stroke of liberation slice through him.

The experiment was over. Done. Finished. No more eternal hours, no more exercises, no more failure and frustration and battling the inevitable — he could begin to live the rest of his life again. But no.

No. Victor’s face rose up before him, the trembling chin and retreating eyes, the narrowed shoulders and the look of pride he wore when he matched one shape to another, and he felt ashamed of himself. He could barely lift his feet as he made his way back to the Institute through the bleak, unsettled streets.

It was Madame Guérin who wouldn’t give up. She searched the streets, the paths of the Luxembourg Gardens where she took Victor for his walks, the cafés and wineshops and the alleys out back of the grocer’s and the baker’s. She quizzed everyone she met and displayed a crude charcoal sketch she’d made of him one night as he sat rocking by the fire, tending his potatoes, and she alerted her daughters and sent old Monsieur Guérin out to limp along the river and look for the inadmissible in the slow, lethal slip of the current.

Finally, on the third day after he’d gone missing, one of the women who sold produce to the Institute’s kitchens came to her and said she’d seen him — or a boy like him — across the river, begging in the marketplace at Les Halles.

She set out immediately, the woman at her side, her feet chopping so swiftly she was out of breath by the time she reached the bridge, but she went on, her blood clamoring and the color come into her face. The day was warm and close, puddles in the streets, the river a flat, stony gray. She was sweating, her blouse and undergarments soaked through by the time they reached the marketplace, and then, of course, the boy was nowhere to be found.

“There,” the woman shouted suddenly, “over there by the flower stall, there he is!” Madame Guérin felt her heart leap up. There, sitting on the pavement beneath a wagon and gnawing at something clenched in his two fists, was a boy with a dark thatch of hair and shoulders narrowed like a mannequin’s, and she hurried to him, his name on her lips. She was right there, right at his side, bent over him, when she saw her mistake — this was a wasted scrap of a boy, starved and fleshless and staring up hostilely out of eyes that were not Victor’s. Her legs felt unaccountably heavy all of a sudden and she had to sit on a stool and take a glass of water before she could think to offer the woman her thanks and start back for the Institute.

She was walking slowly, deliberately, her eyes on the pavement so as to avoid stepping into a puddle and ruining her shoes, and in her mind she was trying to get hold of her loss and fight down her sense of desolation — he would turn up, she knew he would, and if he didn’t, she had her daughters and her husband and her cat, and who was he anyway but a poor, hopeless, wild boy who couldn’t pronounce two words to save his life — when she glanced up to avoid a skittish man with a cane and locked eyes with Victor. He was on the far side of the street, carriages rattling by, the humped shoulders and floating heads of pedestrians intervening, all of Paris moving in concerted motion as if to frustrate her, as if to take him away again, and when she stepped into the road to go to him she didn’t bother to look right or left and she ignored the curses of the ham-fisted man in his wagon and the stutter of his horses’ hooves, because nothing mattered now, nothing but Victor.

For one uncertain moment, he didn’t react. He just stood there, pressed against the wall of the building that loomed behind him, his face small and frightened and his eyes losing their focus. She saw how he’d suffered, saw the mud layered in his hair, the torn clothes, the blood at the seat of his pants. “Victor!” she called, sharply, angrily. What was he thinking? What was he doing? “Victor!”

It was as if those two syllables had become palpable and hard, fastened to a stone that hurtled out of the sky and struck him down.

He fell to his knees and sobbed aloud. He tried to speak, tried to say her name, but there was nothing there. “Uh-uh-uh-uh,” he said, his voice ragged with emotion, “uh-uh-uh-uh,” and he crawled the last few penitential steps to her and took hold of her skirts and wouldn’t let go.

While that scene in the streets was unfolding, Itard was back in his rooms, working with a mute boy who was functionally deaf but had retained some measure of hearing. This boy — his name was Gaspard and he was Victor’s age, fair-haired, well-made, with a quick smile and tractable disposition — had progressed rapidly since coming to the Institute from a remote village in Brittany the preceding year. He could communicate readily by means of signs and he quickly mastered the exercises designed to allow him to associate an object and its graphic representation and then the object and the written word assigned it. For the past month, Itard had been drilling him in the shaping of the sounds of these words with the palate, lips, tongue and teeth, and the boy was beginning to string together discrete bits of sound in a comprehensible way, something Victor had been unable to do, though two years had gone by since he’d first come to the Institute — and Victor had the advantage of normal hearing. It was a conundrum, since Itard refused to believe that Victor was mentally deficient — he’d spent too much time with him, looked too deeply into his eyes, to believe that. At any rate, he was putting Gaspard through his drills and thinking of Victor, of Victor lost and wandering somewhere out there in the city, at the mercy of common criminals and sexual inverts, when Monsieur Guérin knocked at the door with the news that he’d been found.

Itard jumped up from the desk, knocking over the lamp in his excitement, and if it weren’t for Gaspard’s quick thinking and active feet, the whole room might have gone up in flames. “Where?” Itard demanded. “Where is he?”

“With Madame.”

A moment later, with the reek of lamp oil in his nostrils and permeating his clothes, Itard was downstairs in the Guérins’

apartment, where he found Victor lying rigid in the bath while Madame Guérin tended to him with soap and washcloth. Victor wouldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t so much as lift his eyes. “The poor child,” Madame Guérin said, swiveling her neck to gaze up at him.

“He’s been bitten by some animal and lying in filth.” Steam rose from the bath. Two vast pots of water were heating on the stove.

“Victor, you’ve been bad, very bad,” Itard said, letting his intonation express everything he felt except relief, because he had to be stern, had to be like his own father, who would never let a child have his way in anything. Especially this. Running off as if he didn’t belong here, as if he hadn’t been treated with equanimity and even affection — and if he didn’t belong here, then where did he belong?

“Victor!” He raised his voice. “Victor, look at me.”

No response. The boy’s face was a wedge driven into the surface of the water, his hair a screen, his eyes focused on nothing.

“Victor! Victor!” Itard had moved closer until he was leaning over the tub, both hands gripping the sides. He was angry suddenly, angry out of all proportion to the way he’d felt just a moment earlier when Monsieur Guérin had brought him the news. What had changed? What was wrong? He wanted to be acknowledged, that was all. Was that too much to ask? “Victor!”

He couldn’t be sure, because of the bathwater and the influence of the steam, but the boy’s eyelids seemed to be wet. Was he crying?

Was he movable too?

Madame Guérin’s voice came at him out of the silence. “Please, Monsieur le Docteur — can’t you see that he’s upset?”

In the morning, first thing, though it might have been perverse, though it might have been his overzealousness that had precipitated the crisis in the first place, Itard went back to work on Victor, redoubling his efforts. Some elementary principal had been re-established over that bath, a confirmation of the order of being, he the father and Victor the son, and he was determined to take advantage of it while he could. He’d seen the influence of his own and Sicard’s methods on Gaspard and some of the other deaf-mutes, and so he went back to drilling Victor on the simple objects and the words, written out on cardboard, that represented them. At first, Victor was as incapable of making the connection as he’d been at an earlier stage, but as the months progressed a kind of intellectual conversion gradually occurred so that Victor was finally able to command some thirty words — not orally, but in written form. Itard would hold up a card that read BOUTEILLE or LIVRE and Victor, making a game of it, would scramble out the door, mount the stairs to his room and unfailingly fetch the correct object. It was a breakthrough. And after endless repetitions, with several bottles and several books, papers, pens and shoes, he even began to generalize, understanding that the written word did not exclusively refer to the very specific thing in his room but to a whole class of similar objects. Now, Itard reasoned, he was ready for the final stage, the leap from the written word to the spoken that would engage all his faculties and make him fully human for the first time in his life.

For the next year — an entire year, with its fleeing clouds and intermittent rains, its snows and blossomings and stirrings in the trees — Itard trained him in the way he’d trained Gaspard, staring at him face to face and working the cranio-facial muscles through their variety of expressive gestures, inserting his fingers into the boy’s mouth to manipulate his tongue and in turn having the boy touch his own and feel the movement of it as speech was formed. They drilled vowels, reached for consonants, for the simplest phones. It was slow going. “Fetch le livre, Victor,” Itard would say, and Victor would simply stare. Itard would then get up and cross the room to hold the book in his hand, simultaneously pointing to Victor. “Tell me, Victor. Tell me you want the book. The book, Victor. The book.”

In the meanwhile, whenever a breeze would stir the curtains or the clouds would close over the grounds or lightning knife through the sky, Victor would go to the window, no matter what they were doing or to what crucial stage the lesson had attained, deaf to all remonstrance. He had put on weight. He was taller now, by two inches and a half. Stronger. More and more he had the bearing of a man — unnaturally short, yes, and with the unformed features of a boy, but an incipient man for all that. There was the evidence of the hair under his arms and radiating out from his pubes and even the faint translucent trace of a mustache above his upper lip. During this period he was more easily distracted and he seemed to go blank at times, staring, humming, rocking, just as he’d done when he first came out of the woods. Increasingly, he seemed agitated too, and as his body continued to change, he became more of a problem about the grounds.

In addition to the incident with the deaf-mute girl, there was further cause for worry. While Itard couldn’t imagine Victor’s doing serious physical harm to anyone, male or female, the boy continually overstepped the bounds of propriety so that Sicard began to regard him as an immoral influence on the other children, and with good reason. There was no more sense of shame in him than in an arctic hare or an African ape that lived in its skin, and when the mood took him he would pull out his phallus and masturbate no matter the situation or the company (though thankfully, to this point, the abbé was unaware of it). He would rub up against people inappropriately, male and female alike. Increasingly, on awakening, he would dispense with his trousers and sometimes his undergarments too. No amount of discipline or punishment could make him feel shame or even modesty.

Once, when Madame Guérins three daughters were present and they were all of them — the Guérins, Itard and Victor — having a picnic on the grounds of the Observatory in the Gardens, Victor made a fumbling amorous approach to Julie, his favorite of the three.

He was used to seeing Julie, who often came to visit her mother—“Lee, Lee!” he would cry when she came into the room — and she seemed genuinely sympathetic toward him, not simply for her mother’s sake, but because she was good-hearted and compassionate. On this day, however, no sooner had they spread the blanket and opened the hamper, than Victor made a snatch at the lion’s share of the sandwiches and ran off with them to hide in a cluster of trees. This was his usual behavior — he had little sense, after all his training and humanizing, of anyone outside of himself, of pity or fellow-feeling or generosity — but this time there was a twist. A few moments later he came sidling back to the group, his face smeared with fish paste and mayonnaise, and began stroking the hair first of one sister, then another, his fingers visibly trembling as he touched them; then, with each in turn, he laid his head in her lap a moment until finally he got up and seized her by the back of the neck, his grip firm and yet gentle too. When they ignored him, he seemed hurt and pushed himself awkwardly away. The last was Julie, and she was more tolerant than her sisters. The same scenario played out, but then, showing a leap Itard felt he was incapable of, the boy took Julie firmly by the hand, pulled her to her feet and then led her across the grass to the clump of trees where he’d secreted the sandwiches.

The sisters shared a glance and made a remark as suggestive as they could in the presence of their parents, and Madame Guérin gave out with a little laugh of embarrassment, while her husband, stoic, elderly, his considerable nose reddened by the sun, gave all his attention to the sandwich before him. “Our Savage has grown civilized under the spell of feminine charm, eh?” Itard observed.

“And who could blame him?” All eyes, but for Monsieur Guérin’s, focused on the clump of trees and the pronounced sunstruck movement there. Intrigued, and with a lifted eyebrow for the party to show that he was amused and not at all concerned on a deeper level, though he was, of course, knowing Victor’s rudimentary conception of propriety, Itard went to investigate.

Victor, his face bloodless and sober, was gently squeezing Julie’s knees as if they were balls of malleable wax he was trying to shape into something else altogether, and at the same time he kept gesturing to his cache of sandwiches. The sandwiches, four or five of them — all showing conspicuous marks of his teeth — lay in a bed of fresh-picked leaves. Julie tried her best to look bemused, though she was plainly uncomfortable, and after she let Victor stroke her hair and mold her knees for some minutes, she smiled brightly and said,

“That’s enough, Victor. I want to go back to Maman now.”

Victor’s face took on a defeated look as Julie rose in a fragrant swirl of skirts and began to retrace her steps back to the party. “Lee!”

he cried piteously, patting the depression in the grass where she’d been sitting, “Lee! Lee!” And then, in a kind of desperation, he held up the remains of a half-eaten sandwich as the ultimate expression of his love.

Itard was moved by this, of course — he was only human. But he couldn’t conceive of how to instruct his pupil in morals or decorum when he was unable to implant words in his head — Victor couldn’t formulate his own desires, let alone express them, and each day’s exercises seemed to take him further from the goal. Six months went by, then another year. Victor began to chafe under the regimen in a way that recalled the early days, and no matter how many times they worked their facial muscles and their tongues and drilled over the same words, Victor simply could not pronounce them. Itard himself, a man with the patience of the gods, came to dread their sessions, until finally, reluctantly, he had to face the truth — Victor was regressing. Gaspard came and went, working now as a shoemaker’s apprentice, able to read, write and speak with some degree of fluency, and others appeared in his place and learned and developed and moved on too. Sicard was growing impatient, as was the Minister of the Interior, who had authorized the funds for Victor’s care and expected some sort of tangible return on the public investment. But there was some block here, some impediment Victor just couldn’t seem to overcome, and despite himself Itard was forced to admit that it was the irremediable result of those years of estrangement, those years of inhumanity and wandering without any human voice to speak to him. He began to give up hope.

Then there came a day, a bright day of spring with a scent of renewal on the warm breeze blowing up out of the south, when Sicard appeared in the doorway to the doctor’s rooms. Itard had been expecting a student and had left the door ajar, and he looked up in surprise — never, in all his time at the Institute, had the abbé come to visit him in his rooms, and yet here he was, wrapped in his soutane, his features pinched round the tight disapprobation of his mouth. This was trouble, and no doubt about it.

“The Savage,” Sicard spat, and he was so worked up he could barely get the words out.

Itard got up from his desk in alarm and took up the water pitcher and the glass beside it. “Abbé,” he said, already pouring, “can I get you a glass of water? Would you—?”

Sicard was in the room now, swiping one open palm across the other, his robe in a riot of motion. “That animal. That — God help me, but he’s incurable. That idiot. That self-polluter, that, that—”

Itard gave him a stricken look. “What’s he done?”

“What’s he done? He’s exposed himself in the flesh before the assembled female inmates and Sister Jean-Baptiste as well. And, and manipulated himself like one of the idiots in the Bicetre — which is where he belongs. Either there or prison.” He glared at Itard. His breathing — the ratcheting of the air through his nostrils — was thunderous. His eyes looked as if they were about to dissolve.

“But we can’t just abandon him.”

“I will not allow him to corrupt this institution, to pollute the innocent minds of these children — our wards, doctor, our wards.

And worse — what if he acts on his impulses? What then?”

From outside the open window came the cries of the children at their games, the sound of a ball thumped and bodies colliding.

Laughter. Shouts. Children at play, that was all it was. Only the sound of children at play, and yet it depressed him. Victor didn’t play. Victor had never played. And now he was a child no longer.

Itard had tried everything, removing meat from the boy’s diet, as well as any other foods that might contribute to unnatural excitation, giving him long baths again in the hope of calming him, and when he was most worked up, bleeding him till the tension flagged. Only the bleeding seemed to work, and then only for a few hours at a time. He saw Victor’s face suddenly, rising before him in his consciousness, saw the pale descending slash of it in the corner of his room as he sat rocking over his feet and jerking at himself, saw the sheen of the eyes that pulled the whole world back into that primeval pit from which the first civilized man had crawled an eon ago. “He’s not like that,” he said lamely.

“He’s incurable. Ineducable. He must be sent away.”

There was a solution that had occurred to Itard, but it was something he couldn’t discuss with anyone, certainly not the abbé or Madame Guérin. If Victor were able to express himself carnally, to experience the release every healthy male needs if he’s not to become mad, then maybe there was hope yet, because this regression of his, this inability to focus and absorb his lessons — to speak like a human being — was perhaps somehow tied to his natural needs. Itard thought of hiring a prostitute. For months he’d wrestled with the notion, but finally he saw that he couldn’t do it — it was one thing to rescue a child from savagery, hold him up to examination as a specimen, train his senses and his mind, and it was quite another to play God. No man had that right.

“We can’t do that,” he insisted. “He’s a ward of the state. He’s our responsibility. We took him from the woods and civilized him and we can’t just throw up our hands and send him back—”

“Civilized him?” Sicard had spread his feet apart as if he expected to crouch down and grapple over the issue. He’d refused a seat, refused the water. He wanted one thing and one thing only.

“You have no more to say about it.”

“What about the Minister of the Interior? My report to him?”

“Your report will say that you’ve failed.” His expression softened.

“But not for lack of trying. I appreciate the energy you’ve put into this, we all do — but I told you this years ago and I’ll tell you now: give it up. He’s an idiot. He’s filthy. An animal. He deserves only to be locked up.” He snatched up the glass of water as if to examine its clarity, then set it down again. “And more: he should be castrated.”

“Castrated?”

“Like a dog. Or a bull.”

“And should we put a ring through his nose too?”

The abbé was silent a long while. The breeze picked up and rustled the curtains. A shaft of sunlight, golden as butter, struck the floor at his feet. Finally — and he had to raise his voice to be heard over the cries of the children — he cleared his throat and said, “I don’t see why not. Truly, I don’t.”

8

The report, the final report Itard prepared for the Minister of the Interior, was a trial, a kind of crucifixion of the soul that made him want to cry out every time the quill touched the page. It was an admission that he’d wasted five years of his life — and of Victor’s — in assaying the impossible, and that for all his brashness and confidence, all his repeated assurances to the contrary, he had failed.

Ultimately, he had come to understand that the delimiting factors of Victor’s abandonment were insurmountable — that he was, as Sicard insisted, ineducable. In the interest of science and in small measure to justify his own efforts, Itard listed these factors for the official record: “(1) Because he cannot hear the speech of others and learn to speak himself, Victor’s education is and will remain incomplete; (2) His ‘intellectual’ progress will never match that of children normally brought up in society; (3) His emotional development is blocked by profound egotism and by the impossibility of channeling his awakening sexual feeling toward any satisfactory goals.”

As he wrote, the pen seemed to drag across the page as if it were made of lead, every moment of hope he’d experienced in his association with Victor — the boy’s rapid progress in those first few months, his first word, his naming, the leap he’d made in distinguishing written words — rising up before him and then vaporizing in despair. It took him several days and pot after pot of coffee before he began to understand that even in his failure there had been at least a muted success. Victor shouldn’t be compared to other children, he argued, but only to himself — he was no more sentient than a plant when he’d first come out of the woods, differing only from the vegetative state in that he could move and vocalize. He was then the Savage of Aveyron, an animal-man, and now he was Victor, a young man who despite his limitations had learned to make himself useful to society, or at least the society of his guardians, Monsieur and Madame Guérin, for whom he was not only able but eager to perform household tasks such as cutting wood for the fire and setting the table for meals, and in the course of his education he had developed some degree of moral sensibility.

Some degree. He had no sense of shame, but then neither did Adam and Eve before the serpent came into the Garden, and how could he be blamed for that? Perhaps the most wrenching lessons Itard had felt compelled to give him were the ones designed to make him stretch beyond himself, to understand that other people had needs and emotions too, to feel pity and its corollary, compassion.

Early on, when Victor was used to stealing and hoarding food in his room, Itard had tried to teach him a version of the Golden Rule in the most direct way he could think of — each time Victor filched some choice morsel from Itard’s plate or old Monsieur Guérins, Itard would wait his opportunity and swipe something back from Victor, even going so far as to slip into his room in his absence and remove his hoard of potatoes, apples and half-gnawed crusts of bread. Victor had reacted violently at first. The minute he turned his attention to his plate and saw that his pommes frites or broad beans were missing — that they were now on his teacher’s plate — he threw a tantrum, rolling on the floor and crying out in rage and pain.

Madame Guérin made a face. Itard held firm. Over time, Victor eventually reformed — he no longer took food from others’ plates or misappropriated articles he coveted, a glittering shoe buckle or the translucent ball of glass Itard used as a paperweight — but the doctor could never be sure if it was because he’d developed a rudimentary sense of justice or, simply, that he feared reprisal in the way of the common criminal.

That was what led the doctor, sometime during the third year of the boy’s education, to the most difficult lesson of all. It was on a day when they’d drilled with shapes for hours and Victor had been particularly tractable and looking forward to the usual blandishments and rewards Itard customarily gave him at the end of a trying session. The sun was sinking in the sky. Beyond the windows, the clamor of the deaf-mutes in the courtyard rose toward the release of dinnertime. The scent of stewing meat hung on the air.

For several minutes now Victor had been looking up expectantly, awaiting the conclusion of the exercises and anticipating his reward.

But instead of reward, Itard gave him punishment. He raised his voice, told Victor that he’d been bad, very bad, that he was clumsy and stupid and impossible to work with. For a long while he continued in this vein, then rose abruptly, seized the boy’s arm and led him to the closet where he’d been confined, as punishment, when he’d been particularly recalcitrant during the early days of his education.

Victor gave him a look of bewilderment. He couldn’t fathom what he’d done wrong or why his teacher’s face was so contorted and red and his voice so threatening. At first, mewling plaintively, he let himself be led to the door of the closet, but then, as Itard was about to force him into it, Victor turned on him in outrage, his face flushed and his eyes flashing, and for a long moment they struggled for dominance. Victor was bigger now, stronger, but still he was no match for a grown man, and Itard was able to shove him, pleading and crying, into the closet. The door wouldn’t shut. Victor wouldn’t allow it. He braced his feet against the inside panel and pushed with all his strength and when he felt himself losing the battle he lurched forward suddenly to sink his teeth into Itard’s hand before the door slammed shut and the key turned in the lock. It was an emotional moment for the doctor. His hand throbbed — he would have to treat the wound — and the boy would hate him for weeks, but he rejoiced all the same: Victor had developed a sense of justice. The punishment was undeserved and he’d reacted as any normal human being would have. Perhaps it was a small victory — would the Savage of Aveyron, dragged down from his tree, have grasped the concept? — but it was proof of Victor’s humanity and Itard included mention of it in his report. Such a child — such a young man — he argued in conclusion, was deserving of the attention of scientists and of the continued support and solicitude of the government.

The report ran to fifty pages. The Minister of the Interior had it published at government expense, Sicard included with it a letter praising Itard’s efforts, and Itard received some measure of the recognition and celebrity he’d craved. But the experiment was over, officially, and Victor’s days at the Institute were numbered. Sicard militated for the boy’s removal, writing the Minister of the Interior to the effect that for all Itard’s heroic efforts the boy remained in a state of incurable idiocy, and that further he was a growing menace to the other students. It took some time — months and then years of depletion and vacancy — but eventually the government agreed to continue in perpetuity Madame Guérin’s annual stipend of one hundred fifty francs to care for Victor and to award her an additional five hundred francs to relocate, with her husband and the boy, to a small house around the corner from the Institute on the impasse des Feuillantines.

If Victor was at all affected by the move from the only home he’d known, from the room he’d occupied all this time and the grounds he’d roamed till he had every twig and leaf, furrow and rock memorized, he didn’t show it outwardly. He was a great help in moving the Guérins’ furnishings, and the new environment seemed to excite him so that he got down on all fours and sniffed at the baseboard of the walls and examined each of the rooms minutely, fascinated to see the familiar objects — his bed and counterpane, the pots and pans, the twin chairs the Guérins liked to pull up to the fire — arrayed in this new place. There wasn’t much of a yard, but it was free of deaf-mutes, and it was a place where he could study the sky or apply the axe and saw to the lengths of wood Madame Guérin required for the stove, where he could lie in the sun alongside Sultan, who had grown yet fatter and more ponderous as he aged.

And each day, just as she’d done for years, Madame Guérin took him for a walk in the park.

And Itard? He made an effort to visit, at least at first, and on hearing his voice, the boy would come running to him for a hug, and the reward — a bag of nuts or an orange — the doctor never failed to produce. Victor was in his twenties now, shorter than average — short as a child — but his face had broadened and he’d developed a rudimentary beard that furred his cheeks and descended as far as the scar on his throat. When he went out for his walks he still trotted along in his unique way, but around the house and the yard he began to shamble from place to place like an old man. Itard regarded the Guérins as old friends — almost as comrades in arms, as they’d all gone through a kind of war together — and Madame always insisted on cooking for him when he visited, but there was an awkwardness between him and his former pupil now, all the physical intimacy of their years together reduced to that initial hug. What was the point? What could they possibly say to each other? Victor spoke with his eyes, with certain rude gestures of his hands, but that was a vocabulary in which Itard was no longer interested. He was a busy man, in constant demand, his fame burgeoning, and with time his visits became less and less frequent until one day they stopped altogether.

At the same time, the Guérins, now effectively retired from the Institute, were aging in a way that made it seem as if the weeks were months and the months years piled atop them. Monsieur Guérin, ten years his wife’s senior, fell ill. Victor hovered in the doorway of the sickroom, looking out of his neutral eyes, uncomprehending — or at least that was the way it seemed to Madame Guérin. The more her husband needed her, the more Victor seemed to regress. He demanded her attention. He tugged at her dress. Insisted that she come into the next room to fix him his pommes frites at any hour of the day, to pour him milk or massage his legs or simply to look and marvel at something he’d discovered, a spider making its web in the corner where the chimney met the ceiling, a bird perched on the windowsill that was gone by the time she turned her head. And then Monsieur Guérin was gone too and Victor stood bewildered over the coffin and shrank away from the strange faces gathered above it.

The day after the funeral, Madame Guérin didn’t get out of bed until late in the afternoon and Victor spent the day staring out the window, beyond the projection of the building across the street, and into the view of the open lot beyond. He poured himself glass after glass of water, the original liquid, the liquid that took him back to his time of freedom and deprivation, and stared out to where the grass stood tall and the branches of the trees caught the wind. When the light shifted toward evening he moved to the cupboard and set the table as he’d been trained to do: three bowls, three mugs, three spoons and the twice-folded cloth napkins.

Ducking his head, he went into Madame Guérin’s room and stood over the bed gazing at the heaviness of her face, her skin gone the color of ash, the lines of grief that dropped her chin and tugged at the corners of her eyes. He was hungry. He hadn’t been fed all day.

The fire was dead and the house was cold. He motioned to his mouth with his right hand and when Madame Guérin began to stir he took her arm and led her to the kitchen, pointing at the stove.

As soon as she came through the doorway, he knew that something was wrong. She pulled back, and he could feel her arm trembling against his, and there was the table, set for three. “No,” she said, her voice strained and caught low in the back of her throat,

“no,” and it was a word he understood. Her shoulders shifted and she began to cry then, a soft wet in-suck of grief and despair, and for a moment he didn’t know what to do. But then, as tentatively and cautiously as he’d stalked the things he trapped in the grass a whole lifetime ago, he moved to the table and took up the bowl, the cup, the spoon and the napkin and silently put them back where they belonged.

In the years to come, Victor rarely left the house or the small square of the yard, hemmed in as it was by the walls of the surrounding buildings. Madame Guérin became too frail eventually to take him for his walks in the park and so he stood at the window instead for hours at a time or lay in the yard watching the clouds unfurl overhead. He took no pleasure in eating and yet he ate as if he were starved still, still roaming La Bassine with his stomach shrunken in disuse. The food thickened him around the middle and in the haunches. His face took on weight till he was nearly unrecognizable. No one knew. No one cared. He’d once been the sensation of Paris, but now he was forgotten, and even his name — Victor — was forgotten too. Madame Guérin no longer called him by name, no longer spoke at all except to her daughters, who rarely visited, wrapped up as they were in their own lives and passions. And the citizens of Paris, if they remembered him in passing, as they would remember the news of another generation or a tale told round the fire late at night, referred to him only as the Savage.

One morning Sultan vanished as if he’d never existed and before long there was another cat asleep in the chair or in Madame’s lap as she sat and knitted or stared wearily into the pages of her Bible.

Victor barely noticed. The cat was a thing of muscle and hidden organs. It stalked grasshoppers against the wall in the sun and ate from a dish in the kitchen, and with a long, languid thrust of its tongue it would probe itself all over, even to the slit beneath its tail, but mostly it lay inert, sleeping its life away. It was nothing to him.

The walls, the ceiling, the glimpse of the distant trees and the sky overhead and all the power of life erupting from the earth at his feet: this was nothing. Not anymore.

He was forty years old when he died.