Title: Victor
Subtitle: a novel based on the life of the Savage of Aveyron
First published: 1998
Description: This book is based on the true story about a boy eleven or twelve who runs naked in the woods-even in the snow and has long hair and is covered in filth and eats nothing but nuts, berries and acorns and cannot speak. Some villagers claime he is deaf and try to capture him and the feral boy is taken in care of an old lone woman who treats him like a baby. The feral child doesn't understand human tongue and never knows the caress of humans when he feels it. He feels no pain when he takes a potato from the fire with his bare hands. The old woman washes the boy and dresses him an old nightshirt. The feral boy is shown to the village and at night he runs in the woods leaving the old woman alone sobbing and comes upon some campers whom he doesn't see and puts potatos in their fire and takes them with his bare hands. People in Paris are eager about this boy who lived his entire life in the woods. The feral child is brought to Paris to the institute for Deaf-Mutes. He is first introduced to the great Abbe Sicard who teaches at the insitute. The housekeeper  caresses the feral boy, and Julie who is about the boy's age is afraid of him because he behaves more like an animal. The boy gets wild when he is shut indoors and hides himself. Jean Marc Gaspard Itard a young physcian comes to comfort the boy.  Sicard tells Itard that he gets wild when he's left alone and shut up indoors with no sun light and the Pinel is the one that says he must be sent to a Bicetre hospital. Itard knew he would get more wild when he stays with Sicard at the institute but he will become more wild when he's being sent to Bicetre. Itard decides to take the child in and he notices the scar on the child's throat which might have been a wound from a knife, which the child's other scars on his arms and legs were wounds of animal fights. Itard wonders if the boy's parents had done this to him when they abandoned him and he wondered if the boy was about four or five when it happened. He learns that maybe his parents stabbed him because he was mute and left him in the woods because he was mentally retarded. Itard takes the boy in and names him Victor. Itard educates Victor and Julie doesn't like the idea of Victor living with them. She keeps telling Victor that he's an idiot. When Victor is grown up he is left in the care of the housekeeper Madame Guerin. And dies at age 43 in 1828
Subjects: Feral children in fiction, Wild Boy of Aveyron in fiction, France in fiction, Juvenile fiction, Itard, Jean Marc Gaspard, in fiction, Fiction, Feral children, History, feral, France, woods, hunters, woodcutters, village, Paris, deaf-mute, Institute, mentally retarded, enlightment, savage, doctor, Children's fiction, France, history, revolution, 1789-1799, fiction, France, history, 1799-1914, fiction
Places: France, LaCaune France, LaCaune Woods, Mountains of Saint Sernin France, Paris France
People: Jean Marc Gaspard Itard (1775-1838), Wild Boy of Aveyron, Victor of Aveyron, Jean Marc Gaspard Itard
Time periods: 1789-1815, Late 1790s- 1801-1806. 1828
LC classification: PZ7.G325 Vi 1998