T. Boyle - Wild Child and Other Stories

It was as if some switch had been turned off in the enfant’s inner apparatus — he came docilely, holding on to the Commissioner’s hand like a novice on the way to church, while the village followed in solemn processional. Along the way, the rain still lashing down and the streets a soup of mud, people tried to get close enough to touch the child, and they shouted out that he fed only on nuts and roots in the woods — and what would he eat now, a blanquette de veau? Boeuf bourguignon? Langouste? The Commissioner didn’t bother to answer, but he was determined to make his own experiment. First he would clothe the boy’s nakedness and then he would offer him an array of foods to see what he would take and in the process he would try to learn something of this prodigy that would benefit society and the understanding of mankind.

Once home, he shut the door on the villagers and instructed his servant to find a garment for the child, and then, while he ordered up his own dinner, he installed the child in the room he used as his study and offices. A fire was laid and the boy went directly to it. In the room were several chairs, a desk, shelves of legal volumes and volumes of natural history and philosophy, the Commissioner’s papers, a freestanding globe and a birdcage of wrought iron. Inside the cage was a gray parrot his late father had brought back from a voyage to Gambia thirty years earlier; her name was Philomene and she could ask, in penetrating tones, for grapes, cherries and nuts, comment on the weather and the state of inebriation of dinner guests and whistle the opening figure of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in A minor. Excited by the prospect of examining the boy at his leisure, the Commissioner stepped out of the room only long enough to mollify his wife and give orders to have various foodstuffs brought to him; when he returned, the boy’s face was pressed against the bars of the cage and Philomene was vainly serenading him with the Mozart.

He took the boy gently by the hand and led him to the desk, where a servant had laid out a selection of foods, both raw and cooked. There was meat, rye and wheat bread, apples, pears, grapes, walnuts, chestnuts, acorns, potatoes, parsnips and a solitary orange.

Of all this, the child seemed only to recognize the acorns and potatoes, the latter of which he immediately threw into the fire, while cracking the acorns between his teeth and sucking the pulp from them. The potatoes he devoured almost instantly, though they were as hot as the coals themselves; bread meant nothing to him.

Again, and for many patient hours, the Commissioner tried speaking to the child, first aloud and then in dumbshow, but nothing would rouse him; he seemed no more aware than a dog or cat.

And no noise, not even the beating of a drum, affected him. Finally, after making sure the windows were secure and the doors latched, the Commissioner left the child in the room, snuffed the candles and went off to bed. Where his wife scolded him — what was he thinking bringing that savage thing into their house? What if he arose in the night and murdered them all? — and his two sons, Guillaume and Gérard, four and six respectively, informed him that they were too frightened to sleep in their own beds and would have to share his.

In the morning, he approached his study on silent feet, though he kept telling himself there was no need because the child was almost certainly deaf. He lifted the latch and peered into the room, not knowing what to expect. The first thing he saw was the child’s garment, a shift of gray cloth that had been forced over his head the previous night; it lay on the carpet in the center of the room beside a shining loop of excrement. The next thing was the child himself, standing in the far corner, staring at the wall and rocking back and forth on his feet and moaning as if he’d been wounded in some vital place. Then the Commissioner noticed several of his volumes of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière lying facedown on the floor, their leaves scattered to the wind. And then, finally, he noticed Philomene, or what was left of her.

That afternoon the wild child was sent to the orphanage at Saint-Affrique.

He was brought to Saint-Affrique in a fiacre, the jolting and swaying of which caused him a great deal of discomfort. Four times during the journey he became sick on the floor of the carriage and the servant Constans-Saint-Estève had sent along to accompany him did little to relieve his distress, other than daubing at the mess with a rag. The child was dressed in his gray shift, which was knotted tightly at the waist to prevent his removing it, he was barefooted and he’d been provided with a small sack of potatoes and turnips for his sustenance. The horses seemed to terrify him. He rocked on the seat and moaned the whole way. On arriving at the orphanage, he made a bolt for the woods, down on all fours and squealing like a rodent, but his guardian was too quick for him.

Inside the walls, it was apparent that he was no ordinary child.

The director of the orphanage — Citizen R. Nougairoles — observed that he had no notion of sitting at table or of relieving himself in the pot or even the latrine, that he tore at his garment as if the very touch of the cloth seared his skin and that he refused to sleep in the bed provided for him, instead curling up in a pile of refuse in the corner. When threatened, he used his teeth. The other children, curious at first, soon learned to give him his distance. Still, in the short time he was there, a mere two weeks, he did become acculturated to the degree that he seemed to appreciate the comforts of a fire on a bitter day and he extended his dietary range to include pease soup improved with hunks of dark bread. On the other hand, he displayed no interest whatever in the other orphans (or in anyone, for that matter, unless they were in immediate possession of the simple foods he liked to eat). People might as well have been trees for all he responded to them — except when they got too close, of course — and he had no conception either of work or recreation.

When he wasn’t eating or sleeping, he crouched over his knees, rocking and vocalizing in a curious inarticulate way, but every moment he looked for his chance to escape and twice had to be chased down and forcibly restrained. Finally, and this was the one thing Nougairoles found most disturbing, he showed no familiarity with the forms and objects of holy devotion. The Director concluded that he was no imposter, but the real thing — Linnaeus’ Homo ferus in the flesh — and that the orphanage could hardly be expected to contain him.

In the meanwhile, both he and Constans-Saint-Estève wrote up their observations of the child and posted them to the Journal des débats, and from there the other Parisian periodicals took hold of the story. Soon the entire nation was mad for news of this prodigy from Aveyron, the wild child, the animal in human form.

Speculation galloped through the streets and echoed down the alleys. Was he Rousseau’s Noble Savage or just another aborigine? Or perhaps — thrilling conjecture — the loup-garou, or werewolf, of legend? Or was he more closely related to the orangutan, the great orange ape of the Far East, an example of which, it had been proposed, should be mated to a prostitute in order to discover its issue?

Two prominent and competing naturalists — Abbé Roche-Ambroise Sicard, of the Institute for Deaf-Mutes in Paris, and Abbé Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre, professor of natural history at the Central School for Aveyron, located in Rodez — applied to take possession of the child in order to observe and record his behavior before it was further tainted by contact with society. Bonnaterre, being closer at hand, won out, at least in the short term, and he personally took charge of the boy at Saint-Affrique and transferred him to the school at Rodez. For the child, bewildered and aching only to get free of it all, it meant another fiacre, another assault of horses, another unfamiliar face. He was sick on the floor. He clutched the sack of turnips and potatoes to his side and would not let it out of his sight.