Truffaut by Antoine De Baecque & Serge Toubiana

Author:Antoine De Baecque & Serge Toubiana [De Baecque, Antoine & Toubiana, Serge]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

THE WILD CHILD

By the end of June 1969, it was clear to Truffaut that Mississippi Mermaid was his biggest box-office failure. Fortunately, by then he was already completely immersed in the preproduction of L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child), which he was to begin shooting on July 2. Ever since The 400 Blows, Truffaut had been interested in educational experiments with difficult—autistic or delinquent—children. During the spring of 1964, his curiosity had been aroused by the review in Le Monde of a book by Lucien Malson, Les Enfants sauvages: Mythe et réalité (Wild Children: Myth and Reality). The author, better known as a jazz specialist, was a professor of social psychology at the Centre national de pédagogie, where he studied “children who had been deprived of all human contact and had grown up, for one reason or other, in complete isolation.”[88] The most instructive of the fifty-two cases analyzed by Malson was that of Victor of Aveyron, a child who in 1798 had been discovered in the forest by hunters.

Truffaut immediately bought about ten copies of Malson’s book, as he customarily did when he was interested in a book for his work. Jean Itard, a brilliant physician who specialized in the study of auditory processes, had conducted an experiment that fascinated Truffaut. In December 1800, at twenty-nine, Itard was appointed director of the Institut national des sourds-muets (National Institute for Deaf-Mutes) in Paris, where he had been working for some time—specifically on the ten-year-old wild child found in Aveyron, who had become an object of public curiosity. Two opposing theories prevailed in medical circles at the time. For some, the child was a mental defective or idiot whose parents had tried to kill him—he had a deep scar on his throat—and who had been left for dead in the forest. Given this hypothesis, he was at best a fun-fair curiosity, who really should have been locked up in Bicêtre hospital with madmen and other incurables. For others, including Jean Itard, the child had indeed escaped his parents’ knife but was not retarded. Isolation, absence of human communication, and want of affection had made him “wild.” Itard obtained permission to place the child under his care, on condition he demonstrate the results of his instruction. He undertook the task of educating the child, whom he baptized Victor. Little by little, the child learned to use his senses and intelligence, to walk erect, behave properly at the table, and dress on his own; after a time, he could understand simple speech and pronounce some words. Eventually, Victor went on to live to age forty, under the care of a governess, Madame Guérin, in a little house on rue des Feuillantines, near the Institut; he worked at small tasks and lived very frugally.

François Truffaut first considered making a film based on this story in the autumn of 1964 and assigned it to Jean Gruault. By mid-January 1965, the latter suggested a possible theme for the story but his idea didn’t completely satisfy Truffaut, so the scriptwriter did further research.

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