Wild Child

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Little bonus content, little conversation, some bloodthirsty stuff right after the episode. Before all that head chopping during the French Revolution, the job of keeping important records, things like baptisms, marriages, and deaths fell to your local priest. But do you know something that made those revolutionaries grind their teeth? The power of the Catholic Church in France.

And that's why in 1792, the new government put the state, not the church, in charge of record keeping. By 1828, the official death registry was called Get Ready. The index of deaths, seals affixed and lifted, guardianships and conservatorships, legal declarations, inventories, sales of movable goods and declarations of inheritance. Or how about we just call it the index of deaths. The year we're interested in is 1828. And if you scroll through the thousands and thousands of handwritten names, you'll find something odd on page 166, line 26.

Victor Joseph. It says he died on the 12th of February at age 32. People died young in those days. So nothing unusual so far. But there's a problem. Two problems actually. First of all, Joseph wasn't Victor's real family name. We know that for a fact. And 32? That can't be right. By 1828, he would have been older than that, maybe even a decade older. And the rest of the entry gets even weirder. Besides Victor's name off in the margin, the clerk left a note.

It says, known as the Sauvage of Aveyron. By sauvage, they mean wild child, or feral child. It turns out, Victor wasn't his real name either. It was assigned to him by the doctor who made him famous. We'll never know his birth name. Come to think of it, everything about this man's childhood is a mystery, a total blank. That's because when Victor was found, he was just 12 or 13 living in the woods. He couldn't speak. And he'd been out there all alone for years.

Weird stuff. In a way, this story has been with us forever. From Mesopotamian epics to Persian myths to Native American folklore, you'll find stories of children raised in the wild. Remember the Romulus and Remus? They were supposedly abandoned as babies by the Tiber River, but then a she-wolf kept them alive. They grew up to found the city of Rome.

Then there's the Greek myth of Atalanta. Left to die as a baby because her father wanted a boy, she was raised by a bear and became a fearsome hunter devoted to the goddess Artemis. Or, closer to home, who doesn't love Rudyard Kipling's jungle book stories? He borrowed from Indian legends when he created the lovable Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves, a bear, and a panther. And there are a few real-life stories of feral children from the Middle Ages up through the 18th century, but documentation is scarce. Some of those tales might have been cooked up around a campfire, but Victor? He was very real.

Imagine it's 1797 and you're living in Lacaune. That's a region in the south of France. If you're picturing rolling hills, dense forests, and fertile farmland, then you're exactly right. It's heaven on earth. Unfortunately, you're a peasant, so your days are spent tending sheep and looking after the land. It's hard, grinding, back-breaking work. But one sunny afternoon, at the edge of the forest, something catches your eye. No, you think to yourself, it can't be.

But sure enough, it is. A boy. Filthy. Naked as the day he was born. You watch in shock as he unearths one of your potatoes, gives it a long smell, then gnaws right into the damn thing. There he goes again. Another potato. Smell, gnaw, repeat. Suddenly he's bolting straight for the forest. Something spooked him. Maybe that something was you.

Before you can process what's happening, how back the crazy this is, the boy's gone. Disappeared into the woods, like a phantom. Later that evening, as you're sipping a mug of red wine with your peasant neighbors, you finally gather the courage to ask the question that's been on your mind all day. You, uh, haven't by chance seen a naked boy, have you? Rooting around in the potato patch? Turns out, one of your neighbors has seen him. He was gathering acorns from the looks of it.

Someone else chimes in, says they found a pile of moss between two trees. Maybe that's where he sleeps. This was the first time, as far as we know, that anyone saw Victor in the wild. He would have been just nine or ten years old. The following year, a group of woodsmen found him, and they didn't just stand there. They dragged the boy back to the village. The townspeople had never seen anything like this. They tried to talk to the boy to find out who he was and who and where his parents were, but all they got in return were angry grunts. That and a nasty bite for anyone who got too close. As soon as he was able, Victor escaped. Over the next year, there were more sightings. Then, in the summer of 1799, hunters chased him into a tree. He fought, he fought like hell, but they got him. And back to the village he went. This time, they put him in the care of an old widow who somehow managed to get him partially clothed. He refused almost all food except for nuts and potatoes, and those he always smelled before eating. Victor paced and stalked around the woman's house like a trapped animal. It took him eight days, but he finally found his way out. He was on the loose once again, but this time he didn't go back to the woods.

Over the next few months, Victor headed north, eventually entering the region of Ayrong. Winter was bitterly cold that year, cold enough that everyone remembered it. But somehow, he survived, approaching random farmhouses for food. People saw him frolicking in streams, digging in the ground for roots and bulbs, laughing at the wind. And then Victor made a decision that changed his life, and eventually, ours too. On the 8th of January, 1800, in the village of Saint-Sernin, he entered the home of a cloth dyer named Vidal, and Monsieur Vidal called the law.

The official who showed up at Vidal's house was spit-take level astonished. I mean, how many feral children have you seen? Right off the bat, there was a complete failure to communicate. Victor was nonverbal, that much was clear. And when he didn't react to sounds, everyone assumed he was deaf, too. There wasn't anything wrong with his hearing.

But you have to understand, walking into that dyer's house was like stepping through a wormhole. Nothing Victor saw or touched was familiar, except for the handful of foods he recognized. Voices, speech, they meant nothing to him. Victor didn't respond to sounds, not because his ears couldn't hear them, but because his brain wasn't trained to hear them. If it wasn't important for survival, it was just background noise. But no one understood that, not yet. The next day, they took Victor to the nearest orphanage, where he caused a sensation. Newspapers printed first-person accounts of the so-called sauvage, and the story spread like wildfire.

I believe I should inform you citizens of a phenomenal occurrence which has preoccupied all the inhabitants of this community since this morning. Yesterday, a child who was caught in the Lacaune woods by three hunters and was led to our orphanage, of which I'm one of the administrators. The child appears to be twelve years of age at most. He is nice-looking. His eyes are dark and life. It is certain that he lives only on potatoes and nuts. If given some bread, he smells it, bites it, then spits it out and throws it away. It is the same for all other foods.

Surely not one word of this was true, was it? He searches incessantly for a means of escape. We let him out this morning in a field next to the orphanage, and he took to running on all fours. If we had not followed him closely and overtaken him, he would soon have reached the mountain and disappeared. We have just let him free in the garden, and, wanting to escape, he tried to break one of the strips of wood in the gate. He never speaks. Scientists begged the authorities to hand the boy over for study, and of course they did, because those were the times. A child raised entirely on his own, away from the influence of people? That was a goldmine.

Victor was a living, breathing control sample for the process of civilization. You see, over the last century, Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau had set off a fierce debate. It is pretty much the same nature versus nurture argument we hear today. Are humans born good? Do infants come pre-programmed, or are they just empty little vessels waiting to be filled? For scientists, Victor seemed like the key to understanding who we really are, without all the noise and distraction that society and culture piles on.

The experts were clamoring to get their hands on this boy. But after a few turbulent weeks at the orphanage, Victor was off to Rodez, the district seat of Aveyron, and into the hands of Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre, a zoologist and professor of natural history. Bonnaterre was the first scientist to conduct a truly serious examination of Victor.

He reported that, even though the child looked to be 12 or 13 years old, he was only four and a half feet tall. He hadn't gone through puberty. He had a dark complexion and a round face with intense, deep-set eyes. When he laughed, it was loud and raucous. He had a big, toothy grin. Victor's body was covered with scars. Bonnaterre wondered, were they from spending years outside, exposed to the elements? Or was it a sign that perhaps his parents had abused the child, and then cut him loose to fend for himself? As we said before, Victor wasn't deaf. The boy could hear the crack of a walnut shell from across the room. It was one of his favorite foods. But music or speech? Nah, he didn't care about any of that. To the boy, it all seemed to be just meaningless noise. Victor loved warming himself by the fire and didn't mind lifting his robe in front of it, exposing himself to everyone in the room. But Bonnaterre was stunned by the boy's resistance to cold. It seemed almost superhuman. Even with temperatures below freezing, Victor loved to be outdoors wearing nothing at all. At night, he slept with just a thin sheet and somehow stayed perfectly warm. Food was an obsession. It seemed to be the only thing on Victor's mind.

And who could blame him? He must have been hungry all the time out there in the forest. After a while, he learned to shell beans with astonishing skill and even boil them himself. He learned other things too, like how cooked potatoes are way more delicious than raw. But there were these gaping holes in his understanding of the world. The first time Victor saw a mirror, he tried to look behind it to find the boy staring back at him.

Bonnaterre was fascinated, and the conclusion of the report he submitted reads like a farewell letter. Go forth, poor youth, on this unhappy earth. Go forth and lose in your relations with man your primitiveness and simplicity. You lived in the bosom of ancient forests. You found your nourishment at the floor of oaks and beech trees. You quenched your thirst at crystal springs, content with your meager destiny, limited by your simple desires, satisfied with your way of life, beyond which you knew nothing. Oh, may you live happily among your countrymen. May you, man without pretension, display the sublime virtues of your generous soul and transmit to the future generations this honorable example as an eternal proof of what can be done by a innocent nature. That's a lot to live up to. Victor did have something extraordinary to offer future generations. But first, he needed help, serious help. And in Paris, there happened to be a young doctor who was determined enough and brilliant enough and crazy enough to give it a shot.

It took an order from Lucien Bonaparte, yes, that Bonaparte, as in Napoleon's brother, to bring Victor to Paris, to a place that today is called the National Institute for Deaf Youth. It's the oldest school for the deaf in the world, founded in 1771. Almost a year had passed since the savage boy walked into that Dyer's workshop. Victor didn't know it yet, but he'd found a permanent home. The man who ran the Institute for the Deaf was the magnificently that they could help him. But then he saw the boy, the wild state he was in, even after all this time, did not look promising. In fact, every expert who observed Victor's behavior came to the same conclusion, idiocy. They'd seen children like this before in their asylums, all of them lost causes. But one doctor disagreed. Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard was only 26 years old in 1800.

He'd become a physician, not by attending school, but during military service, learning on the job. It must have been a quick study because he aced his exams, beating out students with the benefit of formal medical training. How did he end up at a school for the deaf? Well, like almost everything in this story, it came down to luck. Itard just happened to be living near the Institute when a student was injured. He came to help the child recovered and the director of the school, the one with that absolutely magnificent name, took a liking to the young surgeon. That's why when Victor arrived and everyone dismissed him as a hopeless case, the director gave his blessing to his If Itard really wanted to work with the boy, fine, do it, knock yourself out. And Victor would be the focus of Itard's life for the next five years. Even with all the mysteries surrounding his origins, one thing was clear. This boy had been through hell, captured and recaptured, accosted by curious townspeople, poked and prodded by doctors, and now dragged from the only home he knew to an enormous city. The crowds, the new and noxious smells, the jostling and shoving at every turn. It must have been bewildering for Victor. He even caught a mild case of smallpox on the way to Paris. He recovered, but it was one more hardship, one more strange and terrible thing happening to him in this new and chaotic life. Dr. Itard was convinced that what Victor needed most was stability. So he moved the boy into his own home. His housekeeper, Madame Guerin, tended to Victor's day-to-day needs and quickly became sort of a foster mother. Remember her, because she'll end up being a really important part of Victor's story. Now, for the first time in his life, Victor had what we would call a normal routine, a regular sleep schedule, all the food he wanted, daily walks with Madame Guerin in the nearby Luxembourg gardens. He loved the outdoors.

When the doctor would take him on carriage rides, Victor cackled with delight as the countryside flew by. When the driver slowed down or stopped, he gestured wildly as if to say, keep going faster, faster. Itard's early reports give us the first glimpse of Victor's unique personality, his quirks, the things that made him not a curiosity, but a human being. One morning, there had been a heavy snowfall while he was in bed. When he woke, he uttered a cry of joy, left the bed, ran to the window, then to the door, going and coming impatiently from one to another, and finally escaped, half dressed into the garden. There, voicing his delight, with the most piercing cries, he roared in the snow, gathering it up. By the handful, he devoured it with incredible eagerness. It was clear that both Dr. Itard and the housekeeper, Madame Guerin, saw Victor not as a medical specimen, but as a child, full of a child's wonder and delight at the world. On beautiful moonlit nights, when gérées penetrate into his room, he rarely fails to awaken and go stand in front of the window.

There he remains, according to Madame Guerin, for most of the night, motionless, head high, his eyes fixed upon the moonlight landscape. He seems carried away by a sort of contemplative ecstasy, whose silence and immobility are interrupted only by deep breaths, always accompanied by a plaintive little sound. For all of his mystery, there were so many ways in which Victor was just like any other 13-year-old. He wanted his way, and when he didn't get it, he could be a holy terror. Getting him to wear clothes was a struggle at first, but Itard was patient and clever. He just waited for the damp, chilly air to work its magic. And what do you know? Victor decided that warm clothes was something he could tolerate. Madame Guerin was his anchor in that house. Victor adored her. Dr. Itard maintained a more formal relationship with his young student, but Victor made his affection for the man known. There are times when he welcomes me, times I never use for his instruction. For example, when I go to his room in the evening, just after he's gone to bed, the first thing he does is sit up for me to embrace him. Then he takes my hand and draws it over his eyes, his forehead, the back of his head, and holds it there with his own hand for a very long time. When it came to Victor's education, though, where to begin? He didn't understand how a mirror worked, which made sense given the absence of mirrors in his former woodland home. In fact, he had no comprehension of any two-dimensional image, like a painting. Presented with one, he'd try to grab the objects that were painted on the canvas.

And food? The boy had a healthy appetite, but he was unable to recognize food by sight, only by smell. No one had ever encountered a child like this before. The boy was a wondrous enigma. Dr. Itard made himself a list of goals, things like sharpening Victor's senses, expanding his intellect, helping him settle into his new life. But the most important goal, above all else, was that Victor would learn to speak. Itard was certain he could give this young man a voice.

They began with the French word for water, which seems simple enough. Point to a glass of water, say the word, Victor would get it, right? He'd comprehend. Except Victor's brain didn't process sounds the way yours does. When the doctor said water, which is O in French, it may have sounded like next to nothing. Think of it like this. Imagine listening to an orchestra. If you have average hearing, you can take in the sounds, even if you're not a musician. But can you pick out the oboe or the cello? That takes time and training. Victor could hear the orchestra of language, but not its instruments. He couldn't make sense of all the vowel and consonant sounds.

We know things now that Dr. Itard didn't, like how the window for learning those vowel and consonant sounds opens at six months for vowels and nine months for consonants. That critical period only lasts a few months. It's just not enough that humans arrive in this world with a built-in talent for language, because mastering language requires countless hours of interaction between child and parent or child and caregiver. Though no one knew how long Victor had been alone in the woods, it was clear that he'd not had consistent nurture and care, much less attentive parenting. But Victor was nothing if not resourceful, and when he needed to communicate, he found a way.

If he is in town dining with me, he addresses all his requests to the person who serves the table. If she pretends not to hear him, he puts his plate next to the particular dish he wants and devours it with his eyes. If that produces no result, he takes a fork and strikes the edge of his plate two or three times. If she still neglects him, then he knows no bounds. He plunges a spoon even his hand into the dish, and in the twinkling of an eye, empties it all onto his own plate.

Itar also noted that Victor had use for the kind of social conventions that we call manners. People who visit us out of curiosity know how he dismisses them when fatigued by the visits. With more natural frankness than politeness, he offers for each of our guests, quite deliberately, their cane, gloves, and hat, and pushes them gently towards the door, which he slams shut behind them. You go, Victor, who among us hasn't wanted to do exactly the same at least once. Dr. Itar tried introducing his student to Paris society.

Victor was famous after all, but it didn't go quite as planned. Juliette Récamier was a fabulously wealthy socialite. All the beautiful people flocked to her salons. She invited Victor and the doctor to dinner one evening, and thanks to her biographer, we know just what happened. Victor was seated right next to Madame Récamier. After gorging himself on the buffet of rich and fancy food, and filling his pockets with snacks for later, he slipped away from the table. At first, no one noticed. They were all caught up in conversation.

But then, suddenly a noise came from the garden. We all followed Dr. Itar in search of the fugitive. Soon we glimpsed running across the lawn with the speed of a rabbit. To give himself more freedom of movement, he had stripped to his undershirt, reaching the main avenue of the park, which was bordered by huge chestnut trees. He tore his last garment in two, as if it were simply made of gauze.

Then, climbing the nearest tree with the ease of a squirrel, he perched in the middle of the branches. The guests may have pretended to be scandalized, but you know that this kind of Victor, the wild and savage boy. Dr. Itar employed all the means he knew to recall the boy, without any effect. The savage, insensitive to the entreaties of his teacher, leaped from branch to branch, and from tree to tree, until there were neither trees nor branches in front of him, and he reached the end of the avenue. The gardener had the idea of showing him a basket full of peaches, and, nature ceding to this argument, the runaway came down and let himself be captured. Looks like Victor gave those uppity society Parisians exactly the show they came for, and about as much respect as they deserved.

Where did the name Victor come from? The boy didn't call himself that. He didn't call himself anything. The name Victor was given to him by Dr. Itar. Here's why. During their lessons, Itar noticed that certain sounds provoked a more dramatic reaction from the mysterious boy. Words with a strong, short, O sound in particular. And in French, the name Victor is pronounced Victor. It was as simple as that. With time, Victor learned the letters of the alphabet, and he was able, eventually, to recognize the words for various objects. As far as behavior went, Victor learned how to conduct himself in a restaurant, where he behaved more or less like any other child his age. More and more, Victor was able to blend in. Except for that one time when he got naked in a socialites garden. But what about Dr. Itard's most important goal? To give Victor the power of speech. That wasn't going so well. Now we understand why, but Dr. Itar didn't have the benefit of 20th and 21st century research on language acquisition in children. He kept at it, though. He and Victor together for another four and a half years. Progress was achingly slow at times. And there were days when Dr. Itar privately wondered if maybe Victor would be better off had he remained in the forest. The task of learning a whole language, the vocabulary, the meanings, both written and implied, the complexity of it all. There was just so much to learn.

Close your eyes and let your hands run across an object. Feel its shape, its contours, its weight. Even with your eyes closed, your mind forms a mental image of what your fingers feel. You can imagine it, right? But Victor couldn't. It took weeks of deliberate practice to help him get things by touch. Because, as it turns out, this is another human skill that we develop very early in life. We don't develop it at all. To test Victor's memory of objects, Itar would verbally give Victor a list of items to gather from around the house. And he could do that as long as he wasn't distracted by his first love, nature. Itar observed that the boy would inevitably take a little detour along his way to collect the things Itar had requested.

Victor would stop in the corridor, put his face to the window at one end of it, and let out sharp cries at the sight of the countryside unfolding magnificently into the distance. Then he'd set off again for his room. Once he had his little cargo, he'd go back to the window, renew his homage to the ever-regrettable beauty of nature, and then return to me. It's a gift that Itar recorded stories like this. They remind us that Victor was a real person, not just an experiment.

Over the years, he learned to write a few words and even build the simplest of sentences. He was so close to being able to fully communicate, but he never did learn to speak. Dr. Itard's final report focused on the progress Victor had made with socialization. And that's something that could never have happened without Madame Guerin. The boy loved her like, well, we would say, like a mother. Though if Victor had any notion of what a mother might be, he never could say. Here's just one example. Early in his training, Victor managed to escape from the doctor's house. He made it all the way to the next district before police found him. They had no idea who this strange boy was, a vagrant apparently, so they kept him in custody for two weeks. He couldn't or wouldn't speak for himself. Can you even imagine how terrified Victor must have been? Surrounded by strangers in a strange place, unable to ask for help, their voices harsh and loud to his ears. Eventually, word got back to the Institute, though, and Madame Guerin hurried to the jail to fetch her peculiar little charge.

His joy at being reunited must have been overwhelming. When Victor caught sight of the governess, he turned pale and lost consciousness for a moment. Then he felt himself embraced by Madame Guerin. He suddenly revived and showed his delight by sharp cries, convulsive, hand-wrenching and irradiant facial expression. How does your heart not break for this child? In the eyes of the spectators, he appeared less like a fugitive obliged to return to the supervision of his keeper than an affectionate son who, of his own free will, throws himself in the arms of one who has given him life. Madame Guerin did give him life.

Her job was so much more than making meals and changing sheets. She gave Victor the love and support he needed that every child needs to make progress in his education. In that sense, it's not a stretch to say that Madame Guerin collaborated with Dr. Itar. We know almost nothing about her, not even her first name. But it would be wrong to not acknowledge how important she was and how important she would continue to be for the rest of Victor's life. That's because after five years of work, Itar ended Victor's formal education. He never said why, but maybe he felt he'd done all he could with Victor. After all, the Institute was also full of other children who needed help. Whatever the reason, Madame Guerin was left in charge of Victor's care. The French government agreed to pay her 150 francs a month to look after him. Together, they moved into a home owned by the Institute. Victor would live in that house with Madame Guerin by his side for the next 22 years until his death in 1828. It's estimated that he was about 41 years old when he died.

But Victor's story doesn't end there. Building on his work with Victor, Dr. Itar turned his attention to a group of children with varying degrees of hearing loss. He helped them learn to speak. He published a groundbreaking study of the inner ear, which eventually launched a whole new branch of medicine, what we call otology today. Dr. Itard's student protege and successor, Édouard Séguin, was also a pioneer. His schools for people with intellectual disabilities helped thousands throughout Europe and the United States. But we have to leave France now and fast forward to the end of the 19th century to understand how Victor changed the way children are taught around the world, changed maybe even the way you were taught. Maria Montessori was one of the first women in Italy to receive a medical degree. She had to do her anatomy work, you know, dissecting bodies alone at off hours because the idea of a co-ed anatomy class was just too much to handle, I guess. When she graduated from the University of Rome in 1896, she visited asylums that were overflown with so-called feeble-minded children and the conditions they lived in were appalling.

No stimulation, no education. The children were warehoused, neglected and forgotten. Montessori devoured the writings of Itar and Séguin. Then she got to work. I succeeded in teaching a number of the children from the asylums to read and write so well that I was able to present them at a public school for an examination together with normal children, and they passed the examination successfully. My work is not simply an application of the methods of Séguin to young children, but 30 years after the publication of his second book, I took up the work of this great man with the freshness of spirit with which he received the ideas of his teacher Itar. For 10 years, I not only made practical experiments according to their methods, but through reverent meditation, absorbed the works of these noble and consecrated men. Maria Montessori opened her first Casa dei Bambini, or children's house, in 1907. After that, her innovative teaching methods spread worldwide. The basic concept assumes that for adequate development of the faculties, every child needs just that kind of physiological sense training, which, since the days of Itar and his forest boy, has done wonderful things for idiots and defectives, but which has not been supposed to be needed by your children and mine, ordinary, normal, and somewhat commonplace little brats. If, by improving the five senses of the feeble-minded, you can make him normal or near normal, why not, by the same methods, render the mediocre young citizen as responsive as any genius?

Montessori noted how Dr. Itar took Victor into his home so he could create a hyper-structured learning environment for the boy. Montessori designed her classrooms around the same idea. Many of the educational tools she developed were inspired by things Itar had used with Victor, and Saigon with his students. Even her methods for teaching language were shaped by Victor.

It's a pretty astonishing legacy for the mysterious boy who emerged from the woods, unable to say even his own name. Let's have another look at that musty old death registry. Page 166, line 26. Victor Joseph. The handwriting is beautiful, so elegant, but now you see just how much is missing. When you learn the story behind the name, it doesn't seem right that all Victor gets is a single line of ornate script. As for Madame Guérin, who loved and cared for the boy, there's no mention of her at all.

That single line, it doesn't tell you that Victor was once a child who bathed in cold streams and ate snow and gazed at the moon. A boy whose very existence was an enigma, a puzzle that would never be solved. It doesn't say that Victor changed history, something he probably never knew. Here's how his entry should read. Victor Guérin, known as the Sauvage of Aveyron, the wild boy who helped start a revolution. Not the kind with guillotines and bloodshed, but a revolution in education. Victor couldn't have known it at the time, but he inspired a new way to approach teaching children, one aimed at seeing every child's potential. Victor's legacy lives on even now in the 15,763 Montessori schools worldwide.

Next time on True Weird Stuff. Acne, rosacea, fine lines, wrinkles, enlarged pores, there are all kinds of products on the market to treat your skin. Magical ingredient is retin-A, retinol, tretinoin. You would never guess, never, that the serum you're dabbing on your face has a dark past involving the army, the CIA, and a couple thousand men living in a place they called the Terror Dome. That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode, Erin Cox, Sam Moore, Kary "Doc" Bowser, and Don Morgan. Well, this is an absolute first because today's episode, Wild Child, was written by a true weirdo, one of our listeners, Matthew Benton, who just out of the clear blue decided to whip up an episode and email it, and we decided to produce it because it was wonderful, and Matthew joins us right now for this post-mortem. Matthew, welcome to True Weird Stuff.

Thank you so much, Sheri. I'm so excited. Dude, what possessed you to do this in your spare time? I was blown away when I opened the file and read it. I mean, my husband was like, what are you giggling about? I'm like, you're not even going to believe this, Kev. This guy has written a True Weird Stuff episode. I mean, thank you.

It's amazing, but what possessed you? Well, it is pretty presumptuous, I have to say, when I said this. This is kind of weird, but it was something that you said in a previous episode, the farmhouse murders episode, where there were children who were forced to participate in the aftermath of a murder, and you said, when did we start thinking of children as people and not just little statues or whatever? And I thought, that might be an interesting episode, so I started looking into children's education. How did people in the ancient world view education? How did Native Americans and indigenous people do it? And that led me eventually to Maria Montessori, and my mother was a Montessori teacher, so I already knew who she was, but that led me to Itar, and then Itar led me to Victor, and when I saw Victor, I was like, oh, well, that's the episode is about this feral child that I had never heard about, so that's where the episode came from, and I just did it to get it out of my head. Matthew, it's so funny, because that is the, Max will tell you, that is the classic, that is the classic True Weird Stuff journey.

Like, honestly, I'll be doing one thing, and something else will catch my eye, and it's like a magnetic force that you can't deny. It pulls you down a completely different rabbit hole, and here you are. Victor's story is amazing, and what I find fascinating about the Montessori angle here, we all know, I mean, your mom was a Montessori teacher. We all know people whose kids went to Montessori school or adults who themselves went to Montessori school. I don't think any of them know this. I don't think any of them know this story. It's a fascinating story. When Sherry talked about this story, and I went the wild child, Victor, I knew this story. I had to study this in school. I think I was in about fourth grade, and I think that there's a couple things that were really fascinating about this, not just the Montessori school about it, but the idea about how we learn language. I just never knew this. It's not something I've ever studied that at such a young age, when we're just months old, that's when all of this begins with consonants and vowels.

It's super critical. So I have a niece who has a rare genetic disorder called Angelman syndrome. It's primarily a seizure disorder, but she's nonverbal. She's super mobile and ambulatory and graceful and athletic, but she's nonmobile. She's a candidate for a genetic therapy, a clinical trial that could be a game changer. But the one thing that they can never do is give her the ability to speak. I went with her parents, Matthew, to a consult with a pediatric neurologist who deals with children with this disorder. I said, but why can't she learn to speak?

If they're able to do all of this amazing science, with time and patience, could she learn? This neurologist said to me, what people don't understand is the structures for speech, the neurological structures for speech, those pathways, that door opens for a very brief time. If you don't acquire language during that period, you will not be able to speak, which is, on the one hand, heartbreaking. But on the other hand, you go, well, aren't human beings the most fascinating little machines? Isn't childhood, which is a recent invention, because honest to God, we used to just treat children like small, obnoxious adults and put them out in the fields to work and sell them and stuff. Isn't childhood extraordinary that we have these opportunities from the minute we're born, but they're finite? It makes you realize how critical it is that children have a safe environment and not just safety, but nurture and love right from the very beginning. Matthew, you said that once this story got inside of you, it had to come out, which I so relate to. I suspect you and I share an address on that spectrum of nerding out and info dumping. Does that sound like anything you've been accused of in the past? Oh, yes. Since I was a child, I've always just become obsessed with something. I just want to learn everything about it. Then I'll move on to something else and learn everything about that. Yeah, this is very typical for me. Absolutely. There's something, that's a really specific personality quirk that some of us have. That story gets inside you and you find yourself, so many of the stories we do on True Word Stuff, Max and I will walk around for weeks afterward discussing it and relitigating it because it's in there. When you were writing this story, did you have any theories or ideas of your own about how in the heck this kid ended up alone in the forest? Boy, don't you want to ask him if he could have communicated somehow.

What happened to you? I think that my theory is that he was probably non-verbal from an early age. His parents, whoever they were, probably noticed that there was something not normal about him. Maybe he was ignored. Maybe he had to fend for himself. Maybe he ran off. Maybe his parents died. That's my theory. I think a lot of experts that have looked at this case believe that there was something. Even Itar recognized after five years that he was not making the same progress that the other children in the Institute could make for various reasons. I think he had something going on, but he was not so disabled that he couldn't manage. He was a very wily, very smart kid to survive in the wild. I think there was definitely something going on from an early age, I think. I love that theory because it does make sense. He must have had some sort of care because while a young child could maybe make their way, an infant couldn't. That's the problem with human infants. They're helpless. Their heads are too big. They can't talk or walk or feed themselves. We're not born like animals where you shoot us out and we're standing on four legs and grazing. I agree with you. There must have been some sort of care. Here's what we don't know and can't ever, ever know. We will never have this answer. Did Victor live with his family, whatever that was consisting of? Something terrible happened to them and now he's just alone in the world, non-verbal, Matthew, because I agree with you on that. Non-verbal, unable to communicate, uneducated because they've been living in the deep forest with no idea what the wide world held beyond the patch of land that he had walked.

When you think about it like that, he becomes a younger version of where the crawdads sing. Started off okay and then he ended up alone and managed to fend for himself. It is interesting that his humanness came through despite the fact that he had been by himself. Some people are by themselves and they're happy being by themselves but he really seemed to have an untapped yearning inside to be connected with people in some kind of way and especially the Madame who really became the mother figure in his life. The fact that he demonstrated all of those other human traits along the line and was able to develop those, I think that's kind of fascinating.

Great and heartbreaking too because what does he show us? What does Victor show us? He shows us that at our core, we crave each other. We crave love and companionship and nurture. We were living rough and by his wits. At the first opportunity, look what he moved toward like a flower turning toward the light. He moved toward that love and that affection and this story just kills you because while thankfully Madame Guérin was able to give it to him and he did live longer than anybody would have expected. You can't imagine choosing that life for yourself or for anyone else and Matthew, Victor lived his whole life and had no idea of the enormous impact he would make on the people of earth. Absolutely not and this is actually when I read that the main source for this which is a book called The Wild Boy of Aveyron by Harlan Lane.

When I was reading this book, I did not know how this story ended because when you research it online and you read articles, they never tell you what happened after his education ended. What was the rest of his life like and it was like when I read that his education ended, then he lived with Madame Guérin and I could just talk for hours about her.

I love her so much and nobody ever interviewed her and she's like the white space in this story but it's like that was the end. Itard just sort of ended the education and that was it. He just had that very small, I was hoping that he was in gardens in Paris, going out, maybe not talking to people but enjoying the outdoors, enjoying the the countryside that he loved and I don't think that happened for him. I think he lived in this house in a very sheltered way.

He had his routines with her and there was a man who visited him about 10 years after the education with Itard ended and this person had seen him in the beginning and said he was still wild. He was still non-verbal. He was fearful so it really hurts to know that that's how it ended for him and as you say I want to go back and tell him oh my gosh you were so important.

You have no idea. He was buried in a pauper's grave. There's no marker for him as far as I know. It's like you need a statue for yourself in Paris. You are so important to education for all these people. I want to tell him that. I wish I could. There are a lot of aspects of Victor's story and Madame Guerin's story that we see over and over and over again like that she doesn't have a first name for example. It's a great classic run at what you see when you take a visit to the past like this and Victor I mean in some ways I suppose he could have become like a little society mascot where they dress him up in fancy clothes and take him to various parties and he's on display like he's not even a person. He's a little performing monkey. That could have been one possible fate that I was afraid of for him but there was another option too that you just pointed out somewhere between being a little performing oddity in the salons of Paris and being isolated in this small house with Madame Guerin there was a there was another life in between those where he was out in the world but not as a spectacle maybe just as a citizen right and he was that that didn't happen for him and the thing about so I don't want to I don't want to like be negative about Dr. Itar because he without him recognizing what was possible with Victor, Victor would have languished in the school and probably ended up on the street. Do you think there was any chance that if Itar hadn't scooped him up there was any chance of a happy ending?

No definitely definitely not so before Itar started working with him there was another doctor named Pinel there's so many things that can't make it into the episode I really sympathize you've said this before like every line is a compromise but Pinel observed Victor very very carefully and he was not a dark ages kind of person he was a progressive about institutionalizing people and how people are treated in institutions but he looked at Victor's behavior and he was absolutely wild in those early days and he said look I've got kids that are in my institutions that are more advanced than he is you're not going to be able to make any progress at all with him he thought he needed to just be in the institute in an institution somewhere and housed so that's a hundred percent that that's like the best case scenario if Itar had not started to work with him 100 percent the other thing well and let's remember that those institutions you didn't want to be in one this you know oh my god you want to talk about a snake pit cuckoo's nest yeah go on terrible well the thing about Itar he's a very interesting guy because he never married he didn't have children of his own and so I think that he just thought Victor was going to be fine with Madame Guerra he saw her his Victor's life with her as separate from his education the two were there was a sort of wall between the two and so I think that he ended his the education formally and said well Victor's going to be fine she's going to take care of him they have a house the government's paying them a stipend everything will be fine and I think he just he moved on it's kind of like a doctor you know if you doctors can't give you all of their emotion or they'd have none left so I don't I don't really don't really blame him he wanted to go on and help other people but you're absolutely right that Victor would have been in an institution he would have probably died much much sooner had he not been taken up by Itar and and who knows what direction Maria Montessori might have gone in without being inspired by Itard's work with Victor the thing and I like I said I don't want to be critical of Dr. Itar but it seems pretty clear that he viewed Victor as a fascinating problem to be solved and he tried his damnedest to solve it and when he finally accepted that he'd hit the wall that's when it was time for to go somewhere else and like on the one hand you you want to be you want life to be a sitcom and you want you want him to adopt the boy as his own but that's not how life works that's not how reality works and thank God for the housekeeper I mean this is the courtship of Eddie's father in Enlightenment France like thank God for the housekeeper who was there to step up and give him the one thing that no brilliant physician or scientist ever could and that was simple loving kindness she treated him like he was her boy and he responded as though she was his and that may be the single most beautiful part of this story and the fact that we don't know her name it's really she's amazing and she didn't have any children of her own as far as I know and so I think she absolutely did take to him she would have been probably just a poor person who worked in the institute cleaning just doing housekeeping type works in this institute where there are all these children living and so he was in the actual institute building briefly before he moved in with Itar and so I think that's when she started working with him he glommed on to her and I think it gave her the opportunity to have a child and so that's why I said at the end when

when he dies what happened to her you know whereas she must have been completely aggrieved and she's lost her son this person she's dedicated all these years to and we don't even know who she is and but I as I was very insistent on saying that this was my kind of editorial comment that she collaborated with Itar she absolutely worked with him unbeknownst to him he may not have recognized that but what she did with him because there were routines that they followed at the house and thing he would set the table and things like that he was learning he was being socialized by her and as you say got that love from her that he'd never felt before so I agree with the word collaborate because what she was doing the soft skills that's the phrase that we use now these soft skills the soft skills that she was demonstrating for Victor and the environment of warmth and safety and trust that she created for him made it possible I think for him to learn what Itar was working on I mean we see it even today children that are being terrorized and improperly cared for have a hard time learning in school like it's the it's the Maslow pyramid of needs right if if your survival if your basic survival and safety needs aren't met you're going to have a tough time with algebra and I think what she did for Victor was provide that solid base of that pyramid the warmth the survival the safety the nurture which once he no longer had to worry about where he was going to find his next handful of nuts that freed that freed up some space for him to learn what Itar was teaching and wouldn't Itar have been a genius visionary centuries ahead of his time Matthew if he had recognized that Oh absolutely he and there's a lot of people are interested in the educational part of this his methodology was so brilliant because everything he did with Victor he didn't just say okay Victor do this and if Victor did that then he thought that was a success he would have three other tests to make sure he really understood why he did that make sure he understood things very deeply I'll just give one example Victor could go get a book if he pointed to the word lever which is book he would go and get a book but Dr. Itar recognized that he didn't know that that book that word book means the concept of book not just that particular one and so he had to go through a process how am I gonna how am I gonna teach this boy who can't speak to me that I don't a common language with how am I going to explain to him that this book is like that other book you know what I mean so yeah things that he did over and over for all those years absolutely brilliant he was a brilliant scientist well since you had to leave so many things out and now you know how that feels since you had to leave some things out run us through some of the things that it just really you were like oh I want to put this in if I can make it fit what were some of your favorite things that you learned working on this one of the things you feel like we should know yeah so the thing that I would say first and foremost is the education of deaf people and how that was developing in at this time and that of course is is part of this because it's at the institute for what we now call the institute for deaf youth of Paris which by the way is in exactly the same place right beside the Luxembourg gardens if you ever go to Paris I will be going to that school but it has not moved the oldest school in for the deaf in in in the Europe but how sign language developed the man who who started that institute a man named Epee created sign language

then we know we have in this country Gallaudet University Thomas Gallaudet came over and worked with Sikar that magnificently named Sikar worked with him took one of his pupils over to the United States to start a school for the deaf there there was another school in England that did just verbal or oral training with deaf people and Dr. Johnson Samuel Johnson a famous man of letters would and saw these folks and was just like bowled over he said they they read my lips they can they can hear with their eyes I remember reading that so independently all these different people were trying to work on this problem about how do we educate this group of people that had been ignored because they realized first and foremost that being deaf has nothing to do with your intellect they had assumed all these years that if you're if you're deaf that means that you've an intellectual disability you can't learn which is of course is not true so so many story there's so many veins you could go in that direct in those directions there was a princess I think in Spain who was born deaf and suddenly oh there's a princess who's deaf now we really have to figure out how to educate her so all of course yeah yeah all these things that were sort of lighting a fire I just love these people because I love all of these people because they are they were just the vanguard of that at that time they were just they had no idea what to do they were inventing things as they went just to try to help people and it's just really it's amazing this is so crazy Matthew like I'm loving this because something that happens to us we go into these stories and we end up just loving these people so much and we're so upset that no one knows their name these are amazing people you need to know these people who love these people what what I it's one of my favorite things about working on this show what I love is when you pull just this random thread and you reveal the connections across time and space and geography because this one little story of this wild boy whose entire life is a mystery this wild boy it takes us all around the world into the current age to the Montessori school down the street from my house to Gallaudet I mean all of these things are connected everything is connected and I think the way that we learn in school at least in the United States the way we learn history is everything is siloed it's this war and that war and these dates and this list of presidents and that list of of treaties it's only when you pull it all together that you realize it's all just the story of human civilization and it's all connected in ways that sometimes feel borderline magical I guess is the word like just magical and the number of people like your mom being a Montessori teacher is she still with us yes she's retired now but she was a Montessori teacher three four and five-year-olds for at least 25 years yeah was she aware did you have you talked to her about this uh backstory for Maria Montessori I have talked to her about it and what she mainly remembered is Montessori working with the children in these institutions and she said to me their problem was they were just poor they they had no no issues necessarily intellectually they were just warehoused there and she realized if you give them stimulation well hello they're going to learn they're going to to grow intellectually um but yeah she um I also went to a Montessori school where she taught and so I grew up at least up to the second grade I know what that classroom was like and I think that's

kind of why I'm like I am because the Montessori method allows children in a very structured environment to pick and choose where they want to go that particular day what do you want to work on what do you want to do and so that freedom that was perfect for me so I think that that kind of I I think that um the beautiful part of this story is that kids like you like all around the world kids like you were exposed to a completely different way of learning and engaging the world because of kids like Victor and the children at the institute kids that were considered back then especially defective and a throwaway um I mean when you look at the language that's used to describe children who were institutionalized then right up through the 1940s and 50s in this country they're really kind of dehumanized and sort of um you know there's not a lot is there's not a lot of value there not a lot is expected so not a lot of investment is made because there's not going to be much of a return but what you see in this story all of the people involved Séguin, Itar, Montessori, Geron all of these people were kind of mobilized with a very modern belief in what's possible for children and when you think about it that way you're like damn that's some rock star behavior for the 18th century was it not? Absolutely and I thought that all the way through this research that these are people who would have just been on the streets or they would have on a street corner somewhere there's there's a person begging for money who knows but these people said wait a minute how do we help those people that I see that person how do we help that individual and they weren't right about everything and they got things wrong and we all know that but as you say the impetus was let's try to do something for these people who've been ignored and I just I love them for that I really do. Because then and until fairly recently in human history the children that were housed at the institute were simply housed at the institute they had families most of them and Victor is an outlier you know there were very few wild feral children roaming around people we didn't know what to do with those children and so you know they were packed off to asylums and the episode we're doing next week there's a there was a facility in the city of Philadelphia in the 1950s for severely disabled children and those children were being used for unlawful human experiments and you know why that is? Because those children had little to no value for the people who were productive they certainly weren't going to be ratting anybody out for anything and even beyond that society as a whole did not really give these children their full humanity and so it was possible to you know brutalize and exploit them and that was in this country not all that long ago so when we look at what these really heroic doctors and scientists did in the 18th century with Victor and those other children that's a big story that I'm super glad you could not keep inside anymore because it's an important story and I hope that everyone listening who went to Montessori or who has a child in Montessori is like hot diggity damn I had no idea that that was part of the inspiration for this curriculum that's changed the lives of kids worldwide for generations that's you know most of us will just live and die and watch some tv

hopefully not leave too much of a mess behind but Victor who was you know up a tree scouring for nuts unable to say his own name look at what he did for the world it just goes to show you you can't dehumanize anyone because you have no idea what that person is here for how amazing and special because we all have that potential but it's when we when we slap dehumanizing labels like in the case of Victor and some of the other children well they're idiots they're imbeciles you know they're stupid they're hopeless they're lost causes when we do that we don't just dehumanize the child we we rob all of humanity from potential growth and glory and that is a lesson we don't seem to learn do we Matthew I just I just wanted it was a wonderful episode Sherry said to me before she said Matthew has written an episode perhaps we can get him to actually produce an episode and give you a week well you know so if you gave me a list of topics who knows maybe I'd be get obsessed with one I have to say Matthew um one of the things that I was really struck by when I when I when I opened your email was like I've written this episode for two weird stuff use it don't use it I just needed to get it out I was really taken aback because I don't know how many hours you spent writing this but a lot of these episodes are 20 or more hours worth of research and writing and producing and all of that so I was really struck by wow and then I opened the document and I told Max I'm like this guy wrote in my voice so either you either the voice you wrote in either were the same person or you were just a perfect ventriloquist in some ways like how did you even do that well I've had a lot of practice because my my corporate job my day job in over the years has been writing a lot and I have to adopt the voice of whatever I'm adopting I'm actually very good at that and I wanted to do that I just imagine you saying the words I would I would I would read the script out loud and I would imagine you saying it and if you didn't say if it didn't come out of your mouth right I'd say okay that's not how she would say it and so that's what I try to do um yeah that's how I did it dude I was gobsmacked first of all um we loved your episode but I can't tell you what I mean I don't know that and I've ever experienced a bigger compliment than that I I told Max like I can't even believe this I cannot believe what I'm looking at here and then I sent it to him and Max was like um wow so we were so glad when we reached out that you could you could join us on this post-mortem because we want you to get all the credit for this yeah I want everyone to know that this episode of true word stuff the wild child was written by Matthew Benton and he had to get it out because it was live it inside him and may the good lord bless him with more obsessions that must come out on paper so that we can produce those two we're so glad to have you join us thank you for being a true weirdo and for finding this podcast and listening to it and for experiencing the bliss that we often joke about which is working for free it's good time isn't it thank you so much it's been a pleasure Matthew we hope to have you join us again on a future episode of true weird stuff and we thank all of you for listening to our quirky goofy little show because like Matthew said once these stories get inside you you're going to burst if you can't get them out

and that's pretty much what every week is and next week I honest to god and beside myself to tell you the story of tretinoin retin-a and why in the hell the CIA is involved well let me answer that because the CIA is involved in every damn thing including your neutrogena rapid wrinkle repair we will see you on the next episode of true weird stuff and if you listen to us on apple podcast hit the plus button in the top right corner and now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered and we really appreciate it if you subscribe rate and review true weird stuff hit our website true weird stuff.com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it and bonus content everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff.com and follow true weird stuff on instagram true weird stuff is a Now! Media production our executive producer is anthony garcia the show is written and hosted by me Sheri Lynch along with my deeply weird director Max Sweeten our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser additional production by the mysterious steven call our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr original graphics by kevin nash original artworks by Olivia Axland true weird original music composed and performed by jack griffin and Zane Nash copyright 2025 Now! Media all rights reserved all wrongs remembered you