Free Wild Boy by Mary Losure Page A

visitor.
    It was J.-J. Virey, the scientist who had written a report about Victor years earlier when he first came to the Institute for Deaf-Mutes.
    Seventeen years had passed. Victor was twenty-nine now. The scientist was curious: Had the Savage
ever
learned to talk?
    And the answer, of course, was no.
    Maybe, as J.-J. Virey sat in their little house, Victor looked at him with fear. For how was Victor (or even Madame Guérin) to know the scientist hadn’t come to take Victor away to be studied? After all, it had happened before.
    Twice.
    Maybe Victor and Madame Guérin were both relieved when, after a short visit, the scientist left.
    In any case, all that J.-J. Virey thought worth noting down about Victor now was this: “Today he understands several things, without saying words. . . . He remains fearful, half wild, incapable of learning to speak, despite all the efforts that were made.”
    Dr. Itard once wrote that people looked at the wild boy without really seeing him, passed judgment on him without knowing him, and that after that, they “spoke no more about him.”
    And for the rest of Victor’s life, that was true.
    Victor died in the winter of 1828, when he would have been about forty years old, but we know that only because of a few lines published nearly twenty years later, when Dr. Itard died.
    The article didn’t say what caused Victor’s death. It said only that at the time he died, he’d been living with Madame Guérin at number four, Feuillantines and that he’d been saved from being thrown into Bicêtre by his “protector,” Dr. Itard.
    The mist that hid his life had descended, deeper than ever, and this time it never lifted. Still, we know that Victor lived his whole life in freedom, close to the people he loved. We know he never ran away again — or at least, he always came back.
    It never
did
take much to make him happy.

This book is Victor’s story told as it happened in his own time. For that reason, it doesn’t touch on something that often comes up today: the question of whether the Wild Boy of Aveyron had a condition now known as autism.
    It’s true that some of the wild boy’s traits — his rocking from side to side and his love of order, for example — are sometimes seen in children with autism. On the other hand, his well-documented ability to read other people’s expressions is not typical of autistic children. Neither is the quick and intense attachment he showed for the people who cared for him during the course of his adventures.
    I don’t think we can ever know whether the wild boy was autistic, but in any event, I believe he deserves to be remembered as more than a case study.
    And in the end, though he never learned to talk, the days and months and years he spent working so hard on his lessons were not wasted.
    In later years, Dr. Itard took what he had learned with the wild boy and used it to develop new ways of teaching deaf children. Still later, a student of Itard’s, a man named Édouard Séguin, used many of the same ideas to teach, for the first time ever, children once dismissed as “imbeciles” or “idiots.”
    “It is in the Memoirs on the education of the Wild Boy of Aveyron that Dr. Itard set down the true and the only seeds of positive education,” Séguin wrote. Because of the wild boy, thousands and thousands of children who once would have been confined in boredom and misery in places like Bicêtre were sent to schools of their own and given a chance at a better life.
    Later still, the famous educator Maria Montessori read Dr. Itard’s work. She used it to help develop new teaching methods that influenced teachers around the world. Because of that, today’s children enjoy more freedom to learn in their own way than they would have if one wild boy and his teacher had never met, so long ago in Paris.

Chapter One
    Descriptions of the wild boy in the forest are based on the first eyewitness accounts of his sightings and captures and on later scientific