German, Eastern European, Jewish, etc. His friend Philippe Poloni would relay, "he thought that his father was a conductor, or his mother was a musician, and they met in Montréal. Or something like that, something very romantic. He always said he spoke good German and good Italian because he had a natural connection with those two languages as he had some Italian and some Jewish German blood in his veins." He searched his whole life in the hope of finding his birth parents, to no avail. This frustration and the feeling of a hollow identity inspired many of his works, including Lonely Child (1980). After receiving the young boy, he was given the name of "Claude Roger" by the Sœurs Grises who ran the orphanage, and subsequently baptised at the Église Saint-Enfant-Jésus. He was considered a mentally disabled child, as the nuns believed him to be "deaf and dumb". Apart from this, however, very little is known from his early life in the orphanage due to a lack of record-keeping; any learning disability he may have had went undiagnosed. He was adopted at the age of two-and-a-half by the working class Vivier family from Mile End, with parents Armand and Jeanne (née Masseau), and their two biological children. The couple had suffered a miscarriage many years prior and were looking for a young girl to adopt, only to find each Montreal orphanage having just boys; it is unknown why Claude was chosen out of the many in Saint-Michel. He was a charismatic and excitable child, but his time in the large and strictly Catholic Vivier household was fraught with incidents. After Christmas of 1950, Claude was briefly brought back to the orphanage by the family for unspecified reasons, but was taken back in around half a year later in August 1951. He is reported to have learned to speak at the age of six, before which the family considered sending him to a mental institution. At the age of eight, Vivier was raped by his adoptive uncle, Joseph. He revealed this to a priest during a routine confession, and the priest reportedly told the young Claude that he would not be forgiven unless he told his parents. Vivier's parents became infuriated after he eventually recalled the sexual assault, believing he was either lying or responsible for the whole ordeal. This caused a significant strain in their relationship, and Vivier would