Tarrare | |
|---|---|
 Doctor Pierre-François Percy's original paper on Tarrare's medical history, Mémoire sur la polyphagie (1804) | |
| Other name(s) | Tarar |
| Born | c.1772 near Lyon, France |
| Died | 1798 (aged 25–26) Versailles, France |
| Allegiance |  French First Republic |
| Service | French Revolutionary Army |
| Years of service | 1792–1794 |
| Known for | Extreme appetite |
| War | War of the First Coalition |
Tarrare ([taʁaʁ]; c. 1772 – 1798), sometimes spelt Tarar, was a French showman, soldier and spy noted for his unusual appetite and eating habits. Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry; his parents could not provide for him and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He travelled around France in the company of a band of prostitutes and thieves before becoming the warm-up act for a travelling charlatan. In this act, he swallowed corks, stones, live animals, and a whole basketful of apples. He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer.
At the start of the War of the First Coalition, Tarrare joined the French Revolutionary Army, where even quadrupling the standard military ration was unable to satisfy his large appetite. He ate any available food from gutters and rubbish heaps but his condition still deteriorated through hunger. He was hospitalised due to exhaustion and became the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his eating capacity, in which, among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards, and puppies, and swallowed eels whole without chewing. Despite his unusual diet, he was underweight and, except for his eating habits, he showed no signs of mental illness other than what was described as an apathetic temperament.
General Alexandre de Beauharnais decided to put Tarrare's abilities to military use, and employed him as a courier for the French army, with the intention that he would swallow documents, pass through enemy lines, and recover them from his stool once safely at his destination. On his first mission, he was captured by Prussian forces, severely beaten, and subjected to a mock execution before being returned to French lines.
Chastened by this experience, he agreed to submit to any procedure that might cure his appetite. The procedures failed, and doctors could not keep him on a controlled diet; he snuck out of the hospital to scavenge for offal in gutters, rubbish heaps and outside butchers' shops, and attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital while they were bloodletting and to eat the corpses in the hospital's morgue. After being suspected of eating a one-year-old toddler, he was ejected from the hospital. He re-appeared four years later in Versailles with a case of severe tuberculosis and died shortly afterwards, following a lengthy bout of exudative diarrhoea.