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boy, he had dark, deep-set eyes and unruly hair. His name was Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard.
    He worked in the hospital just down the street, and sometimes he came to the Institute to treat the students there. Some time ago, he had noticed the strange boy roaming the Institute garden. He had begun observing him, quietly and from a distance. He had noticed the wild boy’s habit of sitting alone by the pond in the rain. “I have often stopped for hours with inexpressible delight to consider him in this situation,” he wrote later. But Dr. Itard was not the only one watching the wild boy.

    That winter, a famous psychiatrist named Philippe Pinel issued a report that, like Professor Bonnaterre’s, concluded that the wild boy was most likely an “imbecile.” The report went on to suggest that if the boy really
was
an imbecile, then the best place for him was . . .
an insane asylum
.
    Pinel himself had been the director of two Paris insane asylums: one for men and boys, and one for women and girls. He believed “imbecile” children must be “condemned to vegetate sadly in our asylums” because they were incapable of learning. The asylum where boys were sent was called Bicêtre. It was a huge, fortress-like building on a hill just south of Paris.
    Only a few years earlier, it had been a terrible prison.
    “Debtors are incarcerated [imprisoned] here,” a man called Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote of Bicêtre. “Beggars, and madmen, together with all the viler criminals, huddled pell-mell. There are others, too; epileptics, imbeciles. . . .”
    Mercier described Bicêtre’s “subterranean dungeons, cut off from the light of day and the sounds of the outer world, save for a couple of tiny outlets in the roof.”
    The wild boy, fortunately for him, had no way of knowing what awaited him if people listened to the famous Dr. Pinel.
    But the young, unknown doctor who had been watching the wild boy with such pleasure did.
    And Dr. Itard believed it was
wrong
to send the wild boy to Bicêtre. Society had no right, he wrote, “to tear a child away from a free and innocent life, and send him to die of boredom in an institution.”
    “I never shared this unfavorable opinion,” he wrote of Pinel’s report. Dr. Itard believed the wild boy
could
be taught. “I dared to conceive certain hopes.”
    So Dr. Itard went to Abbé Sicard and asked for permission to become the wild boy’s teacher. Abbé Sicard granted that, and more. He gave Dr. Itard a job as the resident doctor at the Institute for Deaf-Mutes, and with it, an apartment on the Institute’s fourth floor, high above the garden. There, the young doctor could spend all the time he wanted on the task no one else would take — the education of a dirty wild boy.

W HEN THE REFLECTING POND was skimmed with ice and gray skies hung low over Paris, the wild boy had a fire to sit by. He could watch the flames in peace, with no one to tell him “for shame.” He could sit drowsily in a corner, his stomach full, safe from cold-eyed scientists and whispering, giggling sightseers. The wild boy had a new home.
    He had gone to live with Dr. Itard’s housekeeper, Madame Guérin, who lived at the Institute with her husband, Monsieur Guérin. Madame Guérin, Dr. Itard wrote later, was a person with “all the patience of a mother and the intelligence of an enlightened teacher.”
    The wild boy had his own room, just down the hall from Dr. Itard’s study.
    Although the wild boy didn’t know it, Madame Guérin and Dr. Itard had a plan for him. In the beginning, it was quite simple: to treat him kindly, give him plenty of food, and let him do whatever he wanted.
    “It was necessary,” Dr. Itard wrote later, “to make him happy in his own way.”
    Every day, the wild boy had a long, hot bath, and after a while, he began to lose his animal-like ability to withstand cold. When it was time for him to get in the water, he would test it with his fingers to see if it was warm enough. One time when