Wild Boy by Mary Losure

Author:Mary Losure [Losure, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6369-8
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2013-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

The wild boy’s new family also included Madame Guérin’s husband, Monsieur Guérin, but very little is known about him.

And there was still one more member, an even more mysterious figure: a girl named Julie. She was eleven or twelve years old, just about Victor’s age.

She was Madame Guérin’s daughter.

For some reason no one knows, she didn’t live in the apartment with Monsieur and Madame Guérin. But on Sundays, she came to visit. And in time, Madame Guérin began to notice that when Julie came, the boy made a sound that no one had ever taught him.

“Lee!” he’d say happily. “Lee! Lee! Lee!”

In the middle of the night, when Madame Guérin thought Victor was asleep, she would hear him calling all by himself in his room. “Lee! Lee! Lee!”

“He is often heard to repeat lli lli [lee! lee!] with an inflection of voice not without sweetness,” Dr. Itard wrote. “I am somewhat inclined to believe that in this painful linguistic labor there is a sort of feeling after the name of Julie.”

It must have been odd for Julie to have a boy who had once lived all by himself in the forest for a brother, but she does not seem to have minded.

If she had stared at him with distaste, Victor (who was good at reading faces) would have known right away. And surely, he would have avoided her, or brought her bonnet and shawl and tried to hurry her out the door.

But instead, he called out her name.

No one can know whether he and Julie really became friends, but there’s a story from around this time (about another, equally mysterious girl) that offers a tiny clue.

Once, a person watching the wild boy on his trips to the Observatory Gardens with Madame Guérin noticed that Victor seemed to be fond of a young girl, the daughter of an astronomer. Sometimes she would motion to him to sit next to her, and he would obey very shyly, like a puppy with his master. If something distracted him, though, he’d run away.

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