The Story Of Tarrare, The Insatiable Glutton Who Ate Everything From Human Flesh To Live Eels

The Story Of Tarrare, The Insatiable Glutton Who Ate Everything From Human Flesh To Live Eels

An 18th-century French showman, Tarrare could eat enough to feed 15 people and swallow cats whole — but his stomach was never satisfied.

They found Tarrare in a gutter, shoveling fistfuls of garbage into his mouth.

It was the 1790s and Tarrare — born circa 1772 and known only as “Tarrare” — was a soldier in the French Revolutionary Army who was infamous for his almost inhuman appetite. The army had already quadrupled his rations, but even after downing enough food to feed four men, he would still scavenge through the refuse piles, guzzling down every discarded shred of waste they’d thrown away.

And the strangest part of all this was that he always looked as though he were starving. The young man barely weighed 100 pounds and he seemed constantly tired and distracted. He was showing every possible sign of undernourishment – except, of course, that he was eating enough to feed a small barracks.

There must have been a few of his comrades who just wanted to get rid of him. Tarrare, after all, not only burned through the army’s rations but also stunk so horribly that a visible vapor rose out of his body like real-life cartoon stink lines.

And for two military surgeons, Dr. Courville and Baron Percy, Tarrare was too fascinating to ignore. Who was this strange man, they wanted to know, who could have a wheelbarrow of food poured down his throat and still stay hungry?

Tarrare, The Man Who Swallowed Cats Whole

Tarrare’s strange appetite had been with him his whole life. It was completely insatiable, so much so that when he was a teenager, his parents, unable to afford the massive piles of food it took to feed him, kicked him out of their house.

He then made his own way as a traveling showman. He fell in with a band of prostitutes and thieves who would tour France, putting on acts while they picked the audience’s pockets. Tarrare was one of their star attractions: the incredible man who could eat anything.

His massive, deformed jaw would swing open so wide that he could pour a whole basket full of apples down his mouth and hold a dozen of them in his cheeks like a chipmunk. He would swallow corks, stones, and live animals whole, all to the joy and disgust of the crowd.

Tarrare’s reputation preceded him everywhere he went, even in the animal kingdom. Baron Percy, the surgeon who took such an interest in his case, mused in his notes:

“The dogs and cats fled in terror at his aspect, as if they had anticipated the kind of fate he was preparing for them.”

Tarrare baffled the surgeons. At the age of 17, he weighed just 100 pounds. And although he ate live animals and trash, he seemed to be sane. He was seemingly just a young man with an inexplicably insatiable appetite.

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