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it wasn’t, he grabbed Madame Guérin’s hand and stuck it in to show her.
    Now that he felt the cold, the wild boy began to be less impatient about wearing clothing. He’d realized, Itard wrote, that clothes kept him warm. One chilly morning when the wild boy woke up, someone had left his clothes right by his bed. After several mornings, the wild boy put them on himself. In time — although he disliked them most of all and they always made his gait a little heavy — he even wore shoes.
    It was all part of Dr. Itard’s plan.
    Every day, the boy was allowed to do what he liked, and for now that meant the things he knew best: “sleeping, eating, doing nothing and running about the fields.”
    Almost every day, Dr. Itard or Madame Guérin took him for a walk. They went either to the garden of the Paris Observatory or to the Luxembourg Gardens. Both were only a few blocks from the Institute for Deaf-Mutes.
    Not that the wild boy walked. They walked, but he trotted, loped, or galloped. As Dr. Itard put it, these outings were not so much walks as “scampers.” Often, the wild boy would stop to sniff things that to Dr. Itard seemed to have no smell. It was as though the wild boy could sense a whole different world, the world that dogs understand, where smells tell an invisible story. “I have many times seen him stop, and even turn round, to pick up pebbles and bits of dried wood, which he threw away only after holding them to his nose, often with the appearance of great satisfaction,” Itard wrote.
    The wild boy’s new life, wrote Dr. Itard, “was the beginning of the intense affection which he has acquired for his governess [Madame Guérin] and which he sometimes expresses in a most touching manner. He never leaves her without reluctance nor does he rejoin her without signs of satisfaction.”

    Dr. Itard was a serious, studious man who stayed a bachelor all his life. But even he realized how important it was for the wild boy to have a mother. Itard wrote about it in his own, sometimes rather hard-to-understand way, like this: “I shall perhaps be understood if my readers will remember the . . . influence exerted upon a child’s mind by the inexhaustible delights and the maternal triflings that nature has put into the heart of a mother and which make the first smiles flower and bring to birth life’s earliest joys.”
    What he meant was: children need mothers, and now that the wild boy had one, he could begin to be happy.
    It didn’t take much, really. “A ray of sun reflected upon a mirror in his room and turning about on the ceiling, a glass of water let fall drop by drop from a certain height upon his fingertips while he was in the bath, and a wooden porringer containing a little milk placed at the end of his bath, which the . . . [waves] of the water drifted, little by little, amid cries of delight, into his grasp,” Dr. Itard wrote. “Such simple means were nearly all that was necessary to divert and delight this child of nature.”
    Once when it snowed heavily during the night, the wild boy woke up and with “a cry of joy” ran half-dressed into the garden, Itard wrote. “There, giving vent to his delight by the most piercing cries, he ran, rolled himself in the snow and gathered it by handfuls, feasting on it with incredible eagerness.”
    As part of his plan to make the wild boy happy, Dr. Itard often took the boy with him when he was invited out to dinner. If they went on foot, it was impossible to make the wild boy walk by Itard’s side; the boy always wanted to trot or gallop ahead. So instead of walking, they rode in a carriage.
    The carriage would rattle through the narrow streets, past tall houses all joined together and capped with shallow roofs like flat-topped hats, so common in Paris. They’d pass archways leading to cobbled courtyards, or poor neighborhoods where ragpickers and water carriers hurried down the streets, going home to their attic rooms. As it got dark, men would light the