Tarrare: the curse of eternal hunger. How a soldier became a victim of his own body

They say you could smell him from twenty paces away. A sharp, heavy smell of stale sweat mixed with the aroma of a slaughterhouse. You know, history hasn't even preserved his real name for us. Only the nickname — Tarrare. And this is not a proper name, but a popular eighteenth-century French expression that meant something like "tararam" or explosion. Perhaps the best description for what was going on in his stomach could not be invented.

He was not a monster from Gothic novels. He was a deeply sick, unhappy man who lost the war with his own biology. A man whose hunger turned his life into an endless, nauseating nightmare.

Walking Abyss

It all started in rural France, near Lyon, around 1772. As a child, Tarrare ate for four, then for ten. By the age of seventeen, he was eating a quarter of a cow carcass a day just to keep from fainting from exhaustion. His parents, ordinary peasants, were faced with a simple but cruel choice: either they would kick their son out of the house, or the whole family would starve to death. And they pointed him to the door.

Thus began his career as a street circus performer. Tarrare joined a gang of tramps and prostitutes, touring the provinces. His signature act? He ate. But not bread and cheese. He swallowed stones. He swallowed entire baskets of apples. He stuffed his mouth with dozens of wine corks.

Witnesses described his appearance as something extremely repulsive. With a height slightly above average, he weighed about 45 kilograms. The skin on his stomach hung in such huge folds that when he was hungry, he could wrap it around his waist like a grotesque belt. And when he was full, his stomach swelled up like a tightly stretched balloon. His jaws opened at an unnatural angle. And that smell. After eating, he would break out in a sweat and start to stink so badly that people would recoil from him in horror.

But the scariest thing was live animals. There is documented evidence of how he grabbed a stray cat, bit through its throat, drank its blood, and ate it whole, leaving only bones. And after a while, he regurgitated fur. Like an owl. Creepy. And absolutely real.

Spy with a Wooden Box

In 1792, the War of the First Coalition broke out. Tarrare, like many Frenchmen, joined the Revolutionary Army. But the army rations were not designed for a person whose stomach was a black hole. A quadruple portion was not enough for him. He rummaged through garbage heaps, ate leftovers after other soldiers, and eventually ended up in a military hospital in Soultz with severe exhaustion.

There he met Dr. Courville and the chief surgeon of the French army, Baron Pierre-François Percy. Honestly, when reading the Baron's medical reports, you begin to doubt your own adequacy. Percy ordered that a wheelbarrow filled to the top with raw bull's lungs and liver be placed in front of Tarrare — a portion intended for fifteen diggers. Tarrare devoured everything. And fell asleep peacefully.

That's when someone at headquarters came up with a "brilliant" idea. Why not use this anatomical phenomenon for the good of the revolution? General Alexandre de Beauharnais personally conducted an experiment: Tarrare swallowed a wooden box with a document, and after a couple of days... extracted it naturally. The paper remained intact.

So Tarrare became a spy. His mission was to break into Prussia, swallowing a secret message for a captured French colonel. He was given a cart with 14 kilograms of raw offal as a reward, which he immediately destroyed.

The plan failed miserably. First, Tarrare did not speak German at all. Secondly, the Prussians quickly noticed a strange, wildly smelling peasant who was constantly looking for something in the garbage. He was caught. Beaten. Tied to a chair. When the wooden box finally came out, Prussian General von Zobel found only a blank note inside — the French were testing their "agent."

Realizing that he was not a spy, but just a sick village idiot, the general ordered Tarrare to be flogged and thrown onto the French border.

Descent into Darkness

Broken, beaten, and scared to death, Tarrare returned to Baron Percy. He begged to be cured. He no longer wanted to be a circus performer or a spy. He just wanted to stop feeling this all-consuming hunger.

Percy tried. He gave him opium pills, wine vinegar, and tobacco tablets. He fed him soft-boiled eggs in huge quantities. Nothing helped. Tarrare's hunger only intensified, breaking free from the control of reason.

At night, he would run away from the ward. He was found near the tripe shops, fighting stray dogs for rotten bones. He drank the blood of patients who had bloodletting. Doctors demanded that he be transferred to a mental hospital, but Percy continued to defend his "medical phenomenon."

The Rubicon was crossed suddenly and terribly. A fourteen-month-old child disappeared without a trace in the hospital.

There was no direct evidence. But all eyes immediately turned to Tarrare. His reputation, his frightening nightly outings, and his constantly empty, growling stomach said it all for him. Baron Percy could not protect him. An angry crowd of doctors and patients threw Tarrare out of the hospital onto the street. No one heard from him for four years.

Anatomy of Emptiness

In 1798, a dying tramp was admitted to the hospital in Versailles. The chief physician of the hospital, Dr. Tessier, immediately recognized him. It was Tarrare. He was dying of a severe form of tuberculosis (according to another version — from exudative diarrhea). The patient himself weakly whispered that two years ago he swallowed a golden fork, and it was it that got stuck in his intestines, killing him. He begged to be cut open and get it out.

But there was no need to cut the living. A month later, Tarrare died.

What happened next went down in the annals of medical history. The smell from the corpse was so unbearable that the surgeons refused to perform an autopsy. Tessier had to force them. When the scalpel finally opened the abdominal cavity, the doctors recoiled.

Inside, Tarrare was an anatomical anomaly. His liver and gallbladder were monstrously large. And the stomach... The stomach occupied almost the entire abdominal cavity, covered with festering ulcers. His esophagus was so wide that, looking into the open mouth of the corpse, doctors could see the bottom of the stomach. The golden fork, by the way, was never found.

We still don't know exactly what he was sick with. Modern medicine suggests an extreme form of hyperthyroidism in combination with damage to the amygdala or hypothalamus — areas responsible for the feeling of satiety. Or maybe it was Prader-Willi syndrome.

But behind the dry medical terms hides a tragedy. Tarrare was a prisoner of his own body. A man whose physiology turned his existence into torture, and himself — into an outcast. Inside him was only a huge, gaping void that he tried to fill his whole short life. But he never could.