Wild Child and Other Stories

  The sound had come from the garden, and it was followed, sharply, by a second crash. Itard looked to Madame Récamier, who looked to the vacant seat beside her even as one of the notables at the far end of the table cried out, “Look, the Savage—he’s escaping!” In the next moment, the whole party was thrown into turmoil, the men springing up to burst through the doors in pursuit, the ladies gathering at the windows and fanning themselves vigorously to keep from fainting with the excitement of it all, the servants fluttering helplessly round the vacated places at the table and the hostess herself trying to look as if this were all part of the evening’s entertainment. Itard, mortified, threw back his chair in confusion, the napkin clutched like a lifeline in his right hand. He was immobilized. He didn’t know what to do.

  By the time Itard came to his senses, Victor was zigzagging back and forth across the lawn, pursued by a dozen men in wigs, frilled shirtfronts and buckled pumps. Worse, the boy was divesting himself of his garments, flinging the jacket from his shoulders, tearing the shirt down the middle, running right out of his shoes and stockings. A moment later, despite the hot baths, the massages and the training of his senses, he was as naked to the elements as he’d been on the day he stepped out of the woods and into the life of the world—naked, and scrambling up the trunk of one of Madame Récamier’s plane trees like an arboreal ape. Itard moved through the doors as if in a trance, the shouts of prominent citizens—including the august General Jean Moreau, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, future king of Sweden and Norway, and old Monsieur Récamier himself—ringing in his ears. With the whole party looking on, he stood at the base of the tree, pleading with Victor to come down, until finally he had to remove his own jacket and begin climbing.

  The humiliation of that evening stayed with Itard for a long while, and though he wouldn’t have admitted it, it played a role in his attitude toward his pupil in the ensuing weeks and months of his training. Itard cracked down. No longer would he allow Victor to get away with the tantrums that too often put an end to his lessons, no longer would he tolerate any deviance from civilized behavior, which most emphatically meant that Victor would henceforth and strictly keep his clothes on at all times. And there would be no more tree climbing—and no more forays into society. Society could wait.

  At this stage in Victor’s education, in addition to constantly drilling him on his vowels, Itard began to employ the method Sicard had used in training his deaf-mutes to read, write and speak. He began by having Victor attempt to match everyday objects—a shoe, a hammer, a spoon—with simple line drawings of them, the idea being that once Victor had mastered the representation, then the symbols that depicted them in language, the words, could be substituted for the drawings. On the table in Victor’s room, Itard laid out a number of these objects, including the key to Madame Guérin’s food closet, an article of which the boy was especially enamored, and then fastened the drawings to the opposite wall. When he pointed to the drawing of the key, for instance, or the hammer, he demonstrated to Victor that this was the object he wanted. Unfortunately, Victor was unable to make the connection, though Itard persisted, perfecting his drawings and drilling the boy over and over while simultaneously pronouncing the appropriate word: “La clé, Victor, bring me la clé.” Occasionally, Victor did bring the correct object, but just as often, despite a thousand trials, he brought the hammer when the key was wanted or the shoe when it was the spoon his teacher had requested.

  Itard then hit on the idea of having his pupil manually match the objects to the drawings, a less complex task surely. He began by arranging each of the articles on a hook beneath the corresponding drawing. He and Victor sat on the bed in Victor’s room and studied the arrangement—key, hammer, spoon, shoe—until Victor had had time to associate each object with the drawing above it, then he rose, gathered up the objects and handed them to Victor to put up again. For a long while, Victor merely looked at him, his eyes soft and composed, then he got to his feet and put the objects back in their proper order. He was able to do this repeatedly, without hesitation, but when Itard changed the sequence of the drawings, Victor continued to place the objects in their original order—he was relying on his spatial memory alone. Itard corrected him, over and over, and just as often, no matter how Itard arranged the drawings or the objects, Victor placed the things where they had originally been, always relying on memory. “All right,” Itard said to himself, “I will complicate the task.” Soon there were a dozen articles, then fifteen, eighteen, twenty, so many that Victor could no longer remember the order in which they had been arrayed. Finally, after weeks of drills, of firmness, of pleading, of insistence, Itard was gratified—or no, he was delighted, ecstatic—to see his pupil making careful comparison of drawing and object and ultimately mastering the task at hand.

  Next, it was the words. Itard went back to the original four objects, set them on their hooks, printed the signifiers for each in clear block letters—LA CLÉ, LE MARTEAU, LA CUILLER, LE SOULIER—and removed the drawings. Nothing. It was just as before—Victor made no connection whatever between what must have seemed to him random markings and the tangible things on the hooks. He was able only to arrange the items from memory, and no amount of study, no number of repetitions, could enlighten him. Weeks passed. Victor began to balk at the drills. Itard persisted. Nothing happened. Puzzled, he went to Sicard.

  “The boy is congenitally infirm,” the abbé said, sitting behind his great mahogany desk and stroking one of the cats that roamed the Institute’s grounds. “He is, I am sorry to say, an idiot—and not an idiot because he was abandoned but a true idiot, a cretin, and it was his idiocy that was the cause of his abandonment.”

  “He’s no idiot, I can testify to that. He’s making progress. I see it in his eyes.”

  “Yes, and imagine the parents, ignorant peasants, a succession of squalling and filthy children clinging to their knees and little or nothing in the pot and they have this child—this Victor, as you call him—who cannot speak or respond normally. Of course they abandon him. It’s a sad fact of life, and I’ve seen it time and again with my deaf-mutes.”

  “With all due respect, Abbé, he is no idiot. And I’ll prove it. Just give me time.”

  Sicard leaned down to release the cat, a spoiled fat thing which was the brother or uncle or perhaps even the father (no one could remember) of the nearly identical one Madame Guérin kept in her apartments. When he sat back up again, he leveled his eyes on Itard and observed, in a quiet voice, “Just as you did at Madame Récamier’s, I suppose?”

  “Well, I—” This was a low blow, and Itard wasn’t prepared for it. “That was unfortunate, I admit, but—”

  “Unfortunate?” The abbé tented his hands before him. “The boy is an embarrassment—to you, to me, to the Institute and all we’ve accomplished here. Worse: he’s an insult.” He lowered his voice to a whisper: “Give it up, Itard. Give it up while you can—it will destroy you, can’t you see that?”

  But Itard wouldn’t give up. Instead, he abandoned Sicard’s method and went all the way back to the beginning. As he saw it, Victor’s problem was one of perception—and it went deeper, far deeper, than in any of the Institute’s deaf-mutes, whose visual acuity had been honed as an adaptation to their disability so that the thing and its representation in symbols was readily apparent to them. They had little difficulty in discerning the fine gradations in contour that separate one letter from another, a printed b from an h, an l from a t, and once they recognized the system they were able to appreciate it in all its variations. Victor, on the other hand, simply did not see the letters of the words because he couldn’t distinguish simple shapes. And so, Itard came up with the idea of training Victor to recognize basic figures—cardboard triangles, circles, squares, parallelograms—and to match them to the spaces from which they’d been cut. At first, Victor took the new regime as a kind of game, and he was easily able to fit the pieces back in the holes, but then Itard, excited by the boy’s progress, made the drills increasingly comp
licated, varying the shapes, colors and sequences of the pieces until finally, predictably, Victor revolted.

  Imagine him. Imagine the wild child in his suit of clothes with his new name and his newly acquired love of comfort, with the mother-figure Madame Guérin had come to represent there to comfort and caress him and the demanding father, Itard, filling his every waking moment with impossible, frustrating tasks as in some tale out of the Brothers Grimm, and it’s no surprise that he broke down, that his initial spirit, his free spirit, his wild spirit, reasserted itself. He wanted only to roam in some uncontained place, to sleep in the sun, to put his head in Madame Guérin’s lap and sit at the table and eat till he burst, and yet every time he looked up, there was Itard, the taskmaster, with his fierce eyes and disapproving nose. And more, and worse: there were changes coming over his body, the hormonal rush of puberty, coarse hair sprouting under his arms and between his legs, his testes descending, his appendage stiffening of its own accord, morning and night. He grew confused. Anxious. Angry.

  The blowup came on a fine spring afternoon, all of Paris redolent with the perfume of lilac and lily, the southern breeze as soft and warm as a hand laid against a cheek, the pond on the Institute’s grounds giving rise spontaneously to ducklings, whole fleets of them, even as the deaf-mutes capered over the lawns, squealing and whinnying in their high, strained, unnatural voices. Itard had devised an especially complex configuration of shapes and cutouts, posters nailed up on the walls and three-dimensional figures spread across the table, and he could see that Victor was growing frustrated. He was feeling frustrated himself—this morning, like a hundred others before it, offering up hope in such niggardly increments that it seemed as if the glaciers of the Alps and Pyrenees would meet before Victor could learn to perform a task any four-year-old would have mastered in a minute.

  The shapes wouldn’t cohere. Victor backed away, flung himself sullenly on the bed. Itard took him by the arm and forced him to stand and confront the problem, just as he’d done over and over again all morning long, the grip of his iron fingers on the yielding flesh of the boy’s upper arm as familiar to both of them as breathing in and breathing out. But this time, Victor had had enough. With a violence that startled them both, he snatched his arm away and for one suspended moment made as if to attack his teacher, his teeth bared, fists raised in anger, until he turned on the hated objects—the spheres, pyramids and flat geometric figures—and tore them to pieces. He raged round the room, ducking away from his teacher with the animal dexterity that had yet to abandon him despite the weight he was putting on, heaving the scraps out the open window, then rushing to the fireplace to fling ashes round the room and ripping at the sheets of the bed with his teeth until they were shredded, and all the while Itard trying to wrestle him down. Finally, ululating in a new oppressive voice that might have been the call of some carrion bird, Victor threw himself on the floor and fell into convulsions.

  The convulsions were authentic—the eyes sunk back in the boy’s head, his teeth gnashing, tongue bloodied—but they were self-generated for all that, and Itard, who’d witnessed this scene innumerable times in the past, lost control himself. In a flash, he was on the boy, jerking him up off the floor and dragging him to the open window—shock treatment, that was what he needed, a force that was greater than he, implacable, irresistible, a single act of violence that would tame him forever. And here it was, ready to hand. Clutching him by the ankles, Itard thrust the boy through the frame of the open window and dangled him there, five long stories from the ground. Victor went rigid as a board, the convulsions dissolved in the terror of the moment. What must he have thought? That after all the kindness and blandishments, all the food, warmth and shelter, his captors—and this man, this man in particular who had always forced these strange, useless labors on him—had finally shown their true colors. That his teacher was in league with Madame Guérin, that they’d softened him in order to destroy him as surely as the deaf-mutes would have done if they’d had their way, and before them the merciless boys of the villages at the edge of the forest. He’d been betrayed. The ground would rush to meet him.

  For those few minutes, Itard didn’t care what the boy was feeling. All the pain and humiliation of the scene at Madame Récamier’s came rushing back to him, all the endless wasted hours, the unceasing contest of wills, Sicard’s skepticism, the sharpened blade of the world’s ready judgment and failure waiting in the wings. Victor whimpered. He wet his trousers. A pigeon, disturbed on its roost, let out a soft flutter of concern. And then, after all the blood had rushed to Victor’s face, after the sky seemed to explode across the horizon and close back up on itself in a black ball and the deaf-mutes began to gather below, pointing and shouting, Itard tightened his grip and hauled the boy back into the room.

  He didn’t lay him on the bed. Didn’t set him in the chair or back on the floor. He held him up until Victor’s muscles flexed and he was able to stand on his own. Then, very firmly and without hesitation, he made the boy gather up what scraps of cardboard remained, and recommenced the lesson.

  After that excoriating afternoon, Victor seemed to come round. He still balked at his lessons, but not as often—or as violently—as before, and Itard had only to motion to the window to subjugate him completely. There were no more tantrums, no convulsions. Dutifully, his shoulders slumped and head bowed, Victor did as he was told and applied himself to his lessons, gradually acquiring a modicum of skill at matching the geometric shapes to their receptacles. At this point, Itard decided to move forward, attempting to teach him the alphabet through the agency of both his tactile sense and his burgeoning ability to make visual distinctions; to this end, he created a sort of board game in which there were twenty-four compartments, each marked with a letter of the alphabet, and twenty-four corresponding metal cutouts. The idea was for Victor to remove the cutouts from the compartments and then replace them properly, which he seemed able to do right from the beginning with relative ease. It was only by observing him closely, however, that Itard saw that Victor hadn’t learned the letters at all, but was instead painstakingly setting aside the cutouts and simply reversing the order in which he’d removed them. And so Itard complicated the game, as he’d done with the representational drawings, until Victor could no longer memorize the order of the letters but had to concentrate on matching the shapes. Which he finally did. Victoriously.

  This led, shortly thereafter, to Victor’s pronouncing his first word aloud. It came about that one late afternoon, Madame Guérin had poured out a bowl of milk for Sultan, her pampered cat, and then a glass for Victor while the metal letters of the alphabet happened to be laid out on the table in her kitchen, and Itard, always looking for an opportunity of instruction, took up the glass before Victor could reach for it and manipulated four of the cutouts to spell the word for milk: l-a-i-t. Pronouncing it simultaneously—“Lait, lait”—he scrambled the letters and pushed them back across the table to Victor, who immediately arranged them to spell: t-i-a-l. “Good, Victor, very good,” he murmured, realizing his mistake—Victor had seen the word upside down—and quickly rearranging the letters. Again the exercise, and this time Victor spelled the word properly. “Lait, lait,” Itard repeated, and Madame Guérin, at the stove now, took it up too, a chant, a chorus, a panegyric to that simple and nourishing liquid, all the while pointing from the letters on the table to the milk in the glass and back again to his lips and tongue. Finally, with effort, because he’d come to relish milk as much as the cat did, Victor fumbled out the word. Very faintly, with his odd intonation, but clearly and distinctly, he echoed them: “Lait.”

  Itard was overjoyed. Here it was, at long last, the key to unlock the boy’s mind and tongue. After praising him, after losing all control of himself and pulling Victor to him for a rib-rattling hug and pouring him a second and third glass of milk till his lips shone with a white halo, Itard ran off to the abbé’s office to report this coup de foudre, and Sicard, for all his dubiety, withheld judgment. He could have
remarked that even cretins can pronounce a few simple words, that infants of eighteen months can mouth “mama” and “papa,” but instead he simply said, “Congratulations, mon frère. Keep up the good work.”

  The doctor went to bed happy that night and the next night and the night after that, and he remained happy through his mornings and afternoons until he took his dinner with Victor and the Guérins on the third evening after his pupil’s triumph and Victor exclaimed “Lait!” when Madame Guérin poured him a glass of water, cried “Lait!” when she sliced him a piece of lamb, and “Lait, lait, lait!” when she set his potatoes, hot in their jackets, on the plate before him.

  Was the doctor disappointed? Was he crushed, annihilated in the deepest fortress of his spirit? Was he rehearsing the abbé’s words—“Give it up; it will destroy you”—over and over again? Yes, of course he was—how could he not be?—and he showed it in his face, in his gestures, in his attitude toward his ward and pupil, angry at the sight of him, of his thin wrists and too-big head and the flab beginning to accrue at his waist and in his cheeks and breast and under his chin even as Victor matched the metal cutouts to their compartments, singing out “Lait!” every time he succeeded.