28 Facts About Tarrare

Tarrare travelled around France in the company of a band of prostitutes and thieves before becoming the warm-up act for a travelling charlatan.

Tarrare 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.

Tarrare ate any available food from gutters and rubbish heaps but his condition still deteriorated through hunger.

Tarrare 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.

Tarrare re-appeared four years later in Versailles with a case of severe tuberculosis and died shortly afterwards, following a lengthy bout of exudative diarrhoea.

Tarrare drew a crowd by eating corks, stones, and live animals, and by swallowing an entire basketful of apples one after the other.

Tarrare ate ravenously and was particularly fond of snake meat.

In 1788, Tarrare moved to Paris to work as a street performer.

Tarrare appears to have been successful in general, but on one occasion, the act went wrong and he suffered severe intestinal obstruction.

Tarrare was described as having unusually soft fair hair and an abnormally wide mouth, in which his teeth were heavily stained and on which the lips were almost invisible.

Tarrare's body was hot to the touch and he sweated heavily; he constantly had a foul body-odour; he was described as smelling "to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of 20 paces".

Tarrare had chronic diarrhoea, which was said to be "fetid beyond all conception".

Bondeson speculates that Tarrare had a damaged amygdala; it is known that injuries to the amygdala in animals can induce polyphagia.

Tarrare carried out tasks for other soldiers in return for a share of their rations and scavenge on the dungheap for scraps, but this was not enough to satisfy him.

Tarrare was admitted to the military hospital at Soultz-sous-Forets with a case of extreme exhaustion.

Tarrare was granted quadruple rations but remained hungry; he scavenged for garbage in gutters and trash containers, ate the scraps of food left by other patients, and crept into the apothecary's room to eat the poultices.

Tarrare ate the entire meal of two large meat pies, plates of grease and salt and four gallons of milk, and then immediately fell asleep; Courville noted that Tarrare's belly became taut and inflated like a large balloon.

Tarrare promptly tore the cat's abdomen open with his teeth, drank its blood, and proceeded to eat the entire cat aside from its bones, before vomiting the remnants of its fur and skin.

Tarrare was called on by Beauharnais to demonstrate his abilities before a gathering of the commanders of the Army of the Rhine.

Tarrare crossed Prussian lines under cover of darkness, disguised as a German peasant.

Tarrare was chained to a latrine, and eventually, 30 hours after being swallowed, the wooden box emerged.

Tarrare was caught several times within the hospital drinking from patients undergoing bloodletting, and attempting to eat the bodies in the hospital's morgue.

Tarrare told Percy that he had swallowed a golden fork two years earlier, which he believed was now lodged inside him and causing his current weakness.

Tarrare hoped that Percy could find some way to remove it.

Tessier wanted to find out how Tarrare's intestines differed from those of a normal person; he was curious as to whether the gold fork was lodged inside him.

At the autopsy, Tarrare's gullet was found to be abnormally wide, and when his jaws were opened surgeons could see down a broad canal into the stomach.

Tarrare's body was found to be filled with pus, his liver and gallbladder were abnormally large, and his stomach was enormous, covered in ulcers and filling most of his abdominal cavity.