Wild Boy Read Online Free PDF

from them without fail,” wrote a man named J.-J. Virey. (Virey was a scientist who worked at a nearby hospital, observed the wild boy at the Institute, and wrote a report on him.) “He likes solitude a great deal; crowds irritate him and make him uncomfortable and temperamental; he avoids them as much as possible.” He also noted, “If he is afraid of something, he throws himself in the arms of his caretaker [Clair] and pushes him urgently toward his room, where he tries to close himself in and remain alone.”
    Already, a Paris vaudeville theater had staged a musical comedy called
The Savage of Aveyron
. A melodrama based on a novel about a wild child was showing at a second Paris theater.
    A poster appeared with the caption “The Savage of Aveyron, currently at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes.” It showed a drawing of a boy wearing a most peculiar costume: an orange-and-black striped gown with ruffles at the neck and sleeves, not to mention a ridiculous, beribboned hat. And if that wasn’t enough, the boy in the poster had what looked like claws on his hands and feet!
    When sightseers got to the Institute, of course, they soon found out the poster was a fraud, but they kept coming anyway. The wild boy was “annoyed and victimized . . . by idle curiosity hunters of Paris,” one man at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes wrote, “and by the so-called observers [scientists], who bothered him just as much.”
    The scientists, like all of Paris, were curious about the wild boy’s past life. What was it
like
, they wondered, living in the forest like a wild beast?
    The scientists were eager, too, to find the answers to questions that scientists in those days wondered about, such as “What is the True Nature of Man?” and “What role does Civilization play in the True Nature of Man?”
    But for the wild boy to answer any of the scientists’ questions, he had to be taught to talk. And surely, the scientists thought, that wouldn’t take long.
    After all, the wild boy had a wonderful new teacher now: Abbé Sicard, the Miracle Worker.
    A portrait of Abbé Sicard in his classroom shows a kindly man in a black coat, white wig, and shiny-buckled shoes. In the painting, he’s trying to teach a young deaf girl to speak by holding her arm and applying a slight pressure to her wrist and elbow. Other girls, wearing elegant gowns and dainty slippers, watch with rapt attention.
    It would indeed have been a miracle if such a method had worked, but it didn’t. It is very, very difficult for truly deaf children to learn to speak aloud; pressing gently on their arms will not do the trick.
    What the Institute for Deaf-Mutes actually did succeed in doing for its students was to teach them to read and write, using teachers who communicated with sign language. And that, in those days, was considered a “miracle.”
    But now, all of Paris expected the Abbé, the miracle worker, to do something he never had before: teach a “mute” child to talk.
    And for some reason, Abbé Sicard did not seem eager to try.
    Certainly the barefoot, dirty wild boy was not at all the kind of student the Abbé was used to: boys in uniforms, girls in white muslin dresses.
    And besides, why should the Abbé risk his reputation by trying to teach some strange grubby boy who might be no more than an imbecile? What if the Abbé failed?
Then
what would people think of the “miracle worker”?
    So as the days passed, the wild boy did not become Abbé Sicard’s pupil after all. Instead, he remained only a spectacle exhibited to curious visitors.
    At night, before the wild boy went to sleep, “he stood at the window, pressed against the grating, gazing at the countryside,” J.-J. Virey wrote (after talking to Clair). “Sometimes he dreams and becomes agitated, as if he were vexed. He usually has these dreams after a lot of people have visited him during the day.”
    Was
this
to be his future?
    One day at the end of August, the wild boy got into a carriage again, this