(A word of caution: this is not an article to read on your lunchbreak).
He could wrap his empty stomach around his waist like a belt, and began eating his bodyweight in meat every day as a child. His lips were nearly non-existent, and his mouth was so wide, it could hold 12 eggs at once. In other words, the story of Tarrare, the 18th century Frenchman with a truly superhuman appetite, is the kind of horror story that started out innocently enough and snowballed into one of the creepiest, little-known chapters of French history. To understand how an ordinary man turned into one of the world’s greatest gluttons, we have to travel from Lyon to Paris, circa 1788…
Le Pont-Neuf
A teenage Tarrare’s parents kicked him out of the house because, well, they probably couldn’t afford to support his eating habits. He fled to Paris to become a street performer, likely on places like the Pont-Neuf. These days, the bridge looks rather bare, but it used to be the epicentre of the city, packed with vendors, vagabonds and swindlers (Benjamin Franklin thought it so seedy, he refused to walk even across it).
The only drawing of Tarrare.
Tararre downed just about anything for his act, including barrels of apples, corks, rocks, and even live animals. He rather enjoyed snake meat, and swallowed eels whole. No one bothered to see what was so clearly wrong with him. It was a dog-eat-dog world, and he seemed to be just another man out to make a buck. Plus, despite his voracious appetite, at this time, he only weighed 100 pounds (about 45 kilos).
Typical food in the 18th century.
But he was hardly the image of good health. Records from a London Medical and Physical Journal in 1819 describe him as “having unusually soft fair hair and an abnormally wide mouth, in which his teeth were heavily stained”. He also wreaked, suffering from chronic indigestion that stunk “to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces” with a smell “fetid beyond all conception” that got worse after he ate. It’s said “his eyes and cheeks would become bloodshot, a visible vapour would rise from his body, and he would become lethargic, during which time he would belch noisily and his jaws would make swallowing motions”. Cute.
The real trouble started when he joined the French Army, whose practice of rationing meals drove him even more mentally and physically ill. He was hospitalised under army supervision, which is when the severity of his condition became apparent. One of his doctors, Monsieur Courville, was horrified to see him eat the bones and fur of a cat; one of his generals, on the other hand, saw an opportunity…
The General Alexandre de Beauharnais gave Tarrare the task of swallowing documents in a small box to be delivered across Prussian enemy lines. When he was caught, however, the worst torture of all was the lack of his normal, quadruple food intake. When he finally made it back to France, he was hospitalised at Paris’ “Hôtel Dieu”:
Hôtel Dieu
As fate would have it, we went exploring the abandoned hospital recently without knowing anything about Tarrare and what he got up to on its premises; reports claim that he was found sneaking out of his room to snack on cadavers, and when a baby went missing, he was finally arrested.
Today you can still walk the same halls Tarrare frantically scampered down in search of his next victim should you choose (just follow us)…
To this day, no one knows what was really wrong with Tarrare. He likely suffered from some kind of polyphagia, a condition characterised by uncontrollable hunger and a ridiculously high metabolism. But, as Physician Syndee McElory reported to Quartz last year, that doesn’t explain his cannibalistic binges.
He died at the age of 26 in Versailles from tuberculosis. According to his autopsy, most of his organs — with the exception of his incredibly large stomach and liver — were too foul in odour that doctors couldn’t carry out the examination. Today, the true cause of Tarrare’s condition is still eating up (mind the pun) medical historians…
