Free Wild Boy by Mary Losure

the Interior, Jean-Baptiste de Champagny, Dr. Itard pleaded for Victor’s future.
    He wrote that while it was true Victor had never learned to speak, he had become human in the way that really mattered. Victor, his teacher wrote, had overcome the obstacles his “destiny so strange” had set before him; he had become someone with “those generous feelings which are the glory and happiness of the human heart.” He was, Itard wrote, an “extraordinary young man” who deserved the protection and care of others.
    And for years afterward, Dr. Itard continued to defend his former pupil.
    Because of Dr. Itard’s pleading and steadfast support, Victor was allowed to stay on at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes. He continued to live with Madame Guérin, as he had for so long.
    And Julie still came to visit them.
    Finally, in 1810, when Victor was twenty-two years old, Abbé Sicard and the administrators who oversaw the Institute for Deaf-Mutes decided it was time for him to find a new home.
    They said that he couldn’t be made to obey the Institute’s rules. He did not belong in a place where “order and discipline” were important above all else.
    And besides, the Institute for Deaf-Mutes now was only for boys. The administrators pointed out that Madame Guérin had a family who came to visit often, and girls were not welcome at the all-male Institute.
    Neither were the curiosity seekers who still turned up from time to time, wanting to view the Savage.
    So in the summer of 1811, when Victor was twenty-three, he and Madame Guérin moved into their own little house. It was close by the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, so Dr. Itard could come visit. The government offered Madame Guérin a small pension for as long as Victor lived. She wrote a letter saying she accepted “with my deep gratitude” and signed it “Widow Guérin.”
    In another letter, she listed the things Victor would take with him: an old oaken bed, one mattress and a second straw mattress, a pillow, and a wool blanket.
    Their house sat on a quiet, leafy street called the Feuillantines, close by an ancient convent that had been abandoned during the French Revolution. Inside the walls of the convent’s vast, overgrown garden, birds sang and butterflies floated on the still air.
    “A park, a wood, a stretch of open country . . . an avenue of chestnuts with room for a swing, and a dry quarry in which to play at soldiers . . . all the flowers one could possibly want, and what, to a child’s eyes, was a virgin forest” is how the famous writer Victor Hugo described the convent grounds. The author, who was then only a boy, lived just a few doors down from Victor and Madame Guérin, and often played in the garden. Some say the hero of Hugo’s book
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
may have been based on the young boy’s glimpses of the strange, wild man who roamed the convent gardens and never spoke.
    When he wandered the streets of Paris, people recognized him by his loping gait. They called him “le Sauvage,” the Wild One.
    In his quiet, peaceful life at house number four, Feuillantines, he could gather chestnuts from the woods. He could lie by the fire on a winter afternoon, or set out for the quarry and watch clouds race across the sky.

    On a summer morning, he might be outside sawing firewood when the sky turned dark and the stormy wind blew, and what was to stop him from laughing out loud? As the rain poured down and the wet earth released its scents, he might lope through the woods, stand by the quarry and pause for a minute, listening.
    When autumn came, he could lean from a stone bridge over the Seine and watch the yellow leaves drift down the river or visit the horse market with its sweet-smelling hay. He could amble through sunny vineyards and up the slopes of Montmartre’s high hill, where the windmills turned.
    He could do whatever he wanted, for the rest of his life.

One day at their house at number four, Feuillantines, Madame Guérin and Victor had a