Wild Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

time with Abbé Sicard and Professor Bonnaterre. It clattered through the Paris streets and stopped before a vast and splendid building. Soon, the wild boy was padding in his bare feet down gilded hallways and into the magnificent apartments of the French Minister of the Interior, Lucien Bonaparte.
    The Minister had sent a letter to Abbé Sicard, telling him to present the “young savage of Aveyron” to him at noon that day.
    One person who saw the wild boy there reported that the boy reminded him of a bear in a menagerie, his eyes glancing anxiously at the door and windows.
    But the Minister of the Interior turned out to be an eccentric, artistic, and handsome young man. He patted the wild boy on the head and seemed well pleased with him, another observer wrote. The observer wrote, too, that the wild boy showed “lively joy.”
    The meeting lasted a little less than half an hour, but when it was over, the boy (though he would never know this) had made an important and influential friend.
    After the meeting, the wild boy was let out in the Minister’s garden, where (the first observer noticed) he ran very fast, giving “very lively cries of joy.”
    Fall came, and then the damp cold of a Paris winter. In the Institute’s high-walled garden, the fruit trees pinned to the garden walls lost their leaves, the flowers withered, and the grass turned brown. The wild boy roamed the garden alone.
    For Clair had gone home to Rodez.
    The old man had once had a family of his own; in his lifetime, Clair was married and widowed twice. Now, perhaps, he had people who loved him waiting at home, but in any case, he had stayed with the wild boy as long as he could.
    Before he left, Clair told the scientists that if they ever got tired of studying the wild boy, Clair would come back to Paris and get him. He’d take the wild boy home, Clair said, and be a father to him.
    But the wild boy had no way of knowing that.
    All he knew was that “his old guardian, whom he appears to love very much”—as one newspaper report had put it — was gone.
    And now, the wild boy was neglected by everyone who once had been so eager to bring him to Paris. Often, he went hungry. When he could get food from the kitchen, he crept in a corner and ate it all by himself. Sometimes, for reasons that were never written down, he was locked in a dark closet.
    Sometimes he had seizures. He rocked back and forth endlessly. Deep in his throat, he made his unhappy humming noise.
    Days went by, then weeks. And Clair did not come back.
    The other children at the school — about forty boys and twenty girls — lived in a different world from the wild boy.
    At five o’clock every morning, a drumroll so loud they could feel the vibrations woke the boys in their dormitory. They jumped from their cots, put on their uniforms of blue cotton blouses, blue pants, sweaters, and berets, and presented themselves for inspection. Then they trooped down the spiral staircase to the ground-floor dining hall.
    After breakfast, the students went off to their classrooms, where they learned to read and write from their deaf tutors. The boys also worked in shops, where they learned trades such as carpentry, shoemaking, and tailoring.
    After dinner, both boys and girls were let out to play in separate parts of the garden. When he saw the other children, the wild boy ran and hid.
    Sometimes he crouched in the Institute’s attic behind a pile of old building materials.
    But when rain pattered on the roof and everyone else went inside, the wild boy often crept out into the garden, to the tiny, formal reflecting pond that sat among the flower beds. He would circle the pond several times, then sit by its edge and rock himself back and forth as the rain dimpled the surface of the pond. He’d gaze into the water, toss in a handful of dead leaves, and watch them drift.

T HE RAIN FELL STEADILY .
    Inside the Institute a young doctor stood at the window, looking out into the garden. Like the wild