Wild Boy by Mary Losure Read Free Book Online

Lee! Lee!”
    In the middle of the night, when Madame Guérin thought Victor was asleep, she would hear him calling all by himself in his room. “Lee! Lee! Lee!”
    “He is often heard to repeat
lli lli
[lee! lee!] with an inflection of voice not without sweetness,” Dr. Itard wrote. “I am somewhat inclined to believe that in this painful linguistic labor there is a sort of feeling after the name of Julie.”
    It must have been odd for Julie to have a boy who had once lived all by himself in the forest for a brother, but she does not seem to have minded.
    If she had stared at him with distaste, Victor (who was good at reading faces) would have known right away. And surely, he would have avoided her, or brought her bonnet and shawl and tried to hurry her out the door.
    But instead, he called out her name.
    No one can know whether he and Julie really became friends, but there’s a story from around this time (about another, equally mysterious girl) that offers a tiny clue.
    Once, a person watching the wild boy on his trips to the Observatory Gardens with Madame Guérin noticed that Victor seemed to be fond of a young girl, the daughter of an astronomer. Sometimes she would motion to him to sit next to her, and he would obey very shyly, like a puppy with his master. If something distracted him, though, he’d run away.

    The story seems to show that sometimes, Victor
did
make friends with children his own age.
    So maybe Julie was his friend, too.
    Dr. Itard wrote very little about the wild boy’s life with the Guérin family, but one thing is certain: when he was with them, he began, all on his own, to say the beginnings of words.
    Victor often heard Madame Guérin use the expression
“Oh Dieu!”
(
Dieu
, pronounced “dyuh,” is the French word for “God”) and after a while, he began to imitate her. “Oh dee!” he’d cry. “Oh dee! Oh dee!”
    He said it often, Dr. Itard noticed, “in moments of great happiness.”

I N TIME , Victor’s life of doing whatever he wanted all day long came to an end. It began with toys.
    “I have . . . shown him toys of all kinds; more than once I have tried for whole hours to teach him how to use them,” Dr. Itard wrote, “and I have seen with sorrow that, far from attracting his attention, [they] always ended by making him so impatient that he came to the point of hiding them or destroying them. . . . Thus, one day when he was alone in his room he took upon himself to throw into the fire a game of ninepins with which we had pestered him. . . . [We found him] gaily warming himself before his bonfire.”
    But Dr. Itard — unlike Victor — was a very patient person. If one thing didn’t work, he tried another. After dinner one night, he took some silver cups and turned them upside down on the table. He put a chestnut underneath one of the cups. Victor watched, curious.
    The game was an old carnival trick: the one in which a person hides something under one of several cups, then moves them around to see if the person watching can still find the cup with the hidden object.
    Victor could.
    When Itard replaced the nuts with things that weren’t food, Victor still wanted to play the game.
    Dr. Itard was pleased. He wrote that the game was a good mental exercise for Victor; it helped develop his attention span and judgment. It taught him to fix his restless eyes in one place.
    One day, when Victor was very thirsty, Dr. Itard offered him a glass of water and said,
“Eau! Eau!”
(
Eau
, pronounced “oh,” is the French word for “water.”) And then . . . Dr. Itard wouldn’t give him the water.
    Victor waved his hands near the glass, but Dr. Itard acted as though he didn’t understand.
    Madame Guérin stood watching.
“Eau!”
said Madame Guérin, and Dr. Itard gave the glass of water to her, just like that.
    “Eau!”
said Itard.
“Eau!”
And Madame Guérin gave the water back.
    Victor was frantic. “Water!” he gestured. “Water!” But, Dr. Itard and Madame Guérin