to be nurtured at least until the age of 5 or 6; it is inconceivable that any child, including Victor, could survive on his own, in the wild, younger than that. This disability could also explain why he was abused, perhaps treated like an animal, in his earliest years. Bettelheim, 1959 makes a case for this being a general pattern in the lives of so-called feral children. Dramatizations and fictionalizations Victor's life has been dramatized or fictionalized in a number of works: François Truffaut's 1970 film L'Enfant sauvage (marketed in the UK as The Wild Boy and in the US as The Wild Child) performed by Jean-Pierre Cargol. This film helped inspire the 2012 album L'Enfant Sauvage by French metal band Gojira. Adrienne Rich's poem "Meditations for a Savage Child," published in her 1973 collection Diving into the Wreck, is addressed to Victor. a fourth-season episode of In Search Of..., titled "Wild Children", in 1980. the 2003 novel Wild Boy by Jill Dawson. the title novella of the 2010 collection Wild Child and Other Stories by T. C. Boyle. Mordicai Gerstein's novel Victor: A Novel Based in the Life of the Savage of Aveyron. "Victor", a song by the band Maison Neuve released on Sauvage Records Mary Losure's non-fiction children's book Wild Boy: The Real Life of the Savage of Aveyron. Stephen Fry's Planet Word: depicting whether language is developed within a social context. References Further reading External links , originally broadcast 18 Oct. 1994, contains a segment about Victor 1780s births 1828 deaths Feral children French children Year of birth uncertain Deaths from pneumonia in France