Wild Boy Read Online Free PDF Page A

lines about the wild boy’s sickness: “He refused to eat for two days; he was sad and troubled. He was not given any medicine.”
    But he was tough, that wild boy.
    He’d survived many things that would have killed other people. Now smallpox was one more.
    “He recovered very well in a few days,” the scientist noted. When the disease had passed, the wild boy had no new scars — only his old ones, the burns and slashes he’d had for so long.
    Now he barely had time to rest before being bundled back into the carriage.
    In early August, eighteen days after they’d left Rodez, they neared the city of Paris. Ahead in the distance rose two sets of low hills. Between them, in a blue haze, spread a sea of slate roofs, chimneys, and church spires. The sun had already set and the summer night was falling as the stagecoach clattered into the city.

    “[He] arrived . . . at ten o’clock at night in the charge of an old serving man who has been caring for him . . . and of a professor of natural history at the Central School of Rodez, Citizen Bonnaterre,” an article in one of the city’s newspapers, the
Gazette de France
, announced.
    “As yet we know very little about the child, who will now be the object of observations by true philosophers [a term then used to mean scientists] and who will surely be visited promptly.” The scientists, the article said, would be eager to find out all they could about the wild boy, “down to the slightest movements he might make to express his first sensations, his first ideas, his first thoughts.”
    The newspaper noted that Professor Bonnaterre had placed the wild boy “in the hands of the Father of deaf-mutes,” Abbé Sicard.
    In those days, many people believed it was a miracle that so-called deaf-mutes could be taught to read or write. Abbé Sicard had become famous as a “miracle worker.”
    Now the Institute had a new pupil, and all of Paris was watching.

W HEN THE WILD BOY ARRIVED at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, he lay down on the ground and went to sleep. Abbé Sicard woke him up and offered him bread, but the wild boy wouldn’t eat. Instead, he made motions to the Abbé that he wanted to sleep.
    He was allowed to rest for several days.
    He slept and slept, and when he woke, he was in a room high in the Institute’s tall white-stone buildings. He shared it with Clair.
    Below their window lay a high-walled garden with formal paths and a reflecting pond. Beyond the garden, the wild boy could see open country. But on all other sides, behind high walls, lay slate rooftops and city streets.
    In the summer mornings, the sounds of carriages clattering over the cobblestones and the cries of street vendors would have drifted up from the streets below. And the city smells, too: chimney smoke and horse dung and a myriad others.
    What would the wild boy’s life be like in this place?
    His door opened on a hallway that led to a spiral staircase. If he and Clair followed it, down and down, the marble steps led to the building’s front doors, which opened on a courtyard walled by other school buildings and shaded by a giant elm. More doors, on the back side of the building, led to the garden that lay below the wild boy’s window.
    Everywhere, in the halls and on the spiral stairway and in the courtyard and gardens, children came and went. They never spoke aloud. Instead, they made gestures with their hands, the way the wild boy did.
    When they played, they laughed and made natural, untrained cries, the way he did.
    What did he think when he first saw these children who, like him, communicated with their hands and their eyes?
    Perhaps in the beginning he watched them, closely, but they were not kind to him. He soon experienced what one observer described (without saying any more) as “a certain amount of ill-natured treatment” from “children of his own age.”

    What could the wild boy do then, but try to stay out of their way?
    “He detests children of his own age and runs away