I met a wild child

But I'll tell you about it after the better-known story of Victor, the wild child from Aveyron, popularized by Truffaut. If you're passing through the Aveyron village of Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance, you may be struck by the statue of Victor, l'enfant sauvage, in front of the town hall.

How long did Victor live alone in the forest?
It was in the Tarn region of France, near Castres, that the story was first heard. During the winter of 1797, a rumor spread like wildfire throughout the village and the canton: a shaggy, four-legged child of around ten years old had been seen living among the animals, with a gash across his throat. He ate acorns, chestnuts and roots, and climbed trees like a squirrel.
Completely naked and elusive at the approach of humans, it is not easily caught: we even had to lie in wait for several days in a row, taking advantage of the time when it was gathering acorns to seize it in the spring of 1797. However, he escaped.
Fifteen months later, in mid-July 1799, he was captured again, but, put off by his mistreatment (he was locked in a barn, then entrusted to a widow who tried to dress him and whom he promptly bit), he escaped again, begging for food in farms on the outskirts of villages, and was discovered in Saint-Sernin-sur-Rance in January 1800.
It's 7 a.m., and the child shows up at the door of citizen Vidal, a dry cleaner living in a house outside town. Eyes rolling in all directions, dirty, back arched, he claimed asylum from the human world. The dyer notifies the authorities.

Taken in hand by the authorities
The next day, Constant-Saint-Estève, a humanist, decided to take care of him and informed the government of his find, specifying that he should be considered a " phenomenal being". He is 1.36 m tall, covered in scars and does not speak. He walks hunched over, eats only raw potatoes and rejects all other foods, even bread.
The local government representative decides to have him transferred to the Saint-Affrique civil hospice, where orphans are taken in, and he writes this letter to the hospice:
"Citizen, I am sending to your hospice an unknown child aged between 12 and 15, who appears to be deaf and dumb from birth. In addition to the interest he inspires by the deprivation of his senses, he still presents in his habits something extraordinary which brings him closer to the state of savages. In every respect, this interesting and unfortunate being solicits the care of humanity."

When he arrived at the hospice, he was a haggard, exhausted child who bit as soon as you tried to put him to bed; he would not stare at anyone, refused meat whether cooked or raw, and drank water from a jug. Unashamedly, he satisfies his natural needs wherever he is. He also displays deep tenderness when embraced and shown affection.
He is introduced to several couples whose children have disappeared, but none of them recognizes them as their own.
At the end of January 1800, he was transferred to Rodez, where the Minister of the Interior, Lucien Bonaparte (brother of the consul who was soon to become Napoleon), announced that he would claim the unfortunate child if there was no hope of finding his parents.
Lucien Bonaparte writes to the government commissioner for the Aveyron department: " Citizen, I have learned that a young man has been found in your department, who can only utter confused cries and speaks no language. Please send him to me without delay.
And so the wild child leaves Rodez. He had acquired a certain autonomy, eating and dressing himself, but he was still mute. On July 20, 1800, he left for Paris in a horse-drawn carriage, arriving in early August.

Parisian life
From then on, all the newspapers talked about him. He was shown in Paris, exhibited, the whole bourgeoisie wanted to see the wild child. The parish priest Bonnaterre, who accompanied him, christened him "Joseph", and his guardians sniffed out a bargain: this is where the money is! Among them was Philippe Pinel - an alienist who today would be called a psychiatrist, and who ran the Paris asylums for the insane - who put the child through a series of tests. After many unsuccessful attempts, he wrote a report:
" You see, I think this Joseph is an idiot, he didn't become an idiot, he was born an idiot, and that's probably why he was abandoned by his parents in the woods". He thinks that all that's left is to lock him up with the other idiots of Paris in one of the asylums he runs.
However, a young medical student, Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard, disagrees and immediately decides to institute and direct the moral treatment of the child, whose condition has deteriorated considerably since he was exhibited and locked up in Paris.

Victor or the child of the forest
In May 1801, Itard wrote his first " Mémoire sur les premiers développements physiques et moraux du jeune sauvage de l'Aveyron". This long report gave Itard the opportunity to name the child Victor, after Ducray Duminil 's fashionable novel " Victor ou l'enfant de la forêt" (Victor or the Child of the Forest).
He recruited a governess, Madame Guérin, to keep a constant eye on the child, for whom he paid 150 francs a year.
One day, Dr. Itard showed Victor some toys, which he didn't care about at all, but he didn't give up and continued his attempts to socialize him.
Every day, Madame Guérin takes him for a walk in nature. On one occasion, the housekeeper is embarrassed when she sees Victor climbing a tree and doesn't want to come down.
One snowy day, he rolls around in it, squealing with pleasure but not looking cold.
The last report (1806)
Years go by. Victor eventually showed an interest in others. He kisses Dr. Itard's lap, cries when he loses sight of his governess, and then the time comes to teach him to speak - the greatest challenge of all. A specialist in deaf-mutes, Dr. Itard is well aware that Victor is not deaf. Itard's patience enabled the savage to pronounce his first word. The event soon became public knowledge, as reported in La Gazette nationale :

"Today's young man distinguishes and classifies the characters of the alphabet. He does more, pronouncing in an ordinary tone of voice the words milk, soup. He immediately fetches the characters needed to trace these words; he assembles them on a board, and composes the word with all grammatical accuracy. Every day he acquires a new term. True, these are the only ones that have an immediate bearing on his needs, but they are the only ones that a philosopher is even allowed to introduce to him. At last, not only has he been admitted to communicate with us, but he is now in possession of our conventional signs. He has crossed the boundary; he is on our territory."
Victor's big problem is that he never goes beyond the word, and doesn't make the connection between "milk" and its meaning. Doctor Itard wants him to learn to read, but Victor can't do it. He thought he could evolve through learning, but it didn't work. So, in the summer of 1806, Dr. Itard wrote his fourth memoir on the child.
The 80-page report is in fact a statement of failure. As there was no longer any hope, it was decided to leave him in his twenties with Madame Guérin, the governess who had been looking after him since April 1802.
Fallen into anonymity
In early July 1811, Madame Guérin moved in with Victor almost opposite the institution for the deaf and dumb. At nearby number 12, another Victor, still a child, joined his mother from 1812 to 1815, a certain Victor Hugo. Did they cross paths in their shared gardens? No one knows.
Le sauvage de l'Aveyron died at the age of 40, in 1828. Completely forgotten, he had no right to a grave, as he was deemed " insufficiently human ". His body was thrown into a mass grave. Was Victor a wild child, or autistic, probably abandoned by his family?
According to surgeon Serge Aroles, the scars on Victor's body are not those of a long life in the woods, but those of human mistreatment, and he comes to this chilling conclusion: " Victor was a false wild child, but certainly a genuine child martyr".
Sources: Millavois
Let's go to Africa, to Mali to be precise...
Joseph, Markala's wild child.
A dozen years ago, I visited Mali, and back then it was no problem. Unfortunately, the war has prevented me from returning to this country, where I have some excellent memories ... but that's not what I'm talking about today.
I arrive in Markala and my contact takes me to the family who are going to put me up, or at least reserve a corner for me in a room used as a storeroom, where there's a metal bed.... For comfort, it's the hut at the bottom of the garden, where you do everything, even your toilet after drawing water from the well.
Before taking me to my hosts, he warns me that they have a rather special child, a wild child.
Here's his story:
Joseph was three years old when he disappeared. The whole village set out to find him, probing wells and crevices in the ground, searching the surrounding bush. A three-year-old couldn't have gone far, the alarm having been quickly sounded, but nothing - Joseph was nowhere to be found.
The parents mourn, the years pass and, six years later, they learn that a hunter from a neighboring village has captured a child in the bush. They immediately go and find their son, who is now around ten years old.
Shaggy, he walks on all fours, expresses himself only in grunts, laps up his water, refuses all cooked food, sleeps curled up on the ground and his body is pockmarked with scars from his life in the bush among thorny trees. How did he survive? It's a mystery.
Of course, we're in Africa, but there's no need to refer to the epinal image of Tarzan being raised by monkeys. There are none in Mali, whose fauna is limited to warthogs and a breed of long-legged rabbits. There are crocodiles and hippopotamuses along the Niger, but in the friendly genre, you can do better.

It is assumed that Joseph has been captured by a Sufi, a kind of hermit who lives in seclusion from the world, but none is known in the region.
Joseph is examined by doctors who find no signs of abuse, his health is good and he has clearly not lacked for anything .His parents took him home, but despite their best efforts, they were unable to socialize him. I sometimes played with him and he surprised me with his colossal strength. Very mischievous, we had to chain up the bowl in which we put his food, as he had a habit of throwing it onto the roof. Only the threat of a stick could make him back down, which lends credence to theSufi's theory , for who but a human can lift a stick as a gesture of threat?

I saw him again on other visits, but he was still as wild as ever, until the day his parents had to part with him, because as he grew up, puberty took its toll, and he saw his mother and sisters only as females... and they would have been no match for his assaults; what's more, he had acquired such strength that even his father could no longer control him.
I learned two years ago that he had died, taking his mystery with him. He must have been about twenty years old.
Unfortunately, I no longer have any photos of him.
This is the story of Joseph, the wild child of Markala, Mali.
Claude Boyer
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