The Horrific Story Of The Man Who Couldn't Stop Eating

Also nobody knows what his real name was before "Tarrare." The word is said to have come from a French saying, bom-bom-tarrare, which was used to describe particularly violent explosions. Run the quick numbers on that nickname and you'll figure out that this was likely given to him because the dude's farts and shits were mental. So sure, he was hungry all of the time, his parents disowned him, and his face was super weird, but at least he's going to forever be known for the force with which stuff came out of his butt. So score one for Tarrare.

And it was with this group that Tarrare really started to hit his stride, adding a ton of weird stuff to his diet. He started off with corks, which he basically treated like Doritos. Then he grabbed rocks -- you know, the things every person on Earth is repeatedly told to not eat, despite how much they may look like Milk Duds. And he took it all like a champ.

OK, he took it mostly like a champ. Something happened to his guts that required a hospital visit and a buttload of laxatives, and Tarrare was able to use this time in a hospital bed shitting his brains out to think about other potential careers. Wait, actually, I'm seeing right here that this didn't happen. He instead asked the surgeon to fork over his watch and chain so that he could eat it to prove he was feeling fine. So don't worry, Tarrare was still at the top of his game.

In other words, "Damn, this dude eats like a horse AND a bear. Also, DAMN."

Instead of running Tarrare out of the hospital for casually eating all of their life-saving drugs, the surgeons decided to perform some studies on the skinny young beast. With the heart of a true showman, Tarrare had to give his new buddies something to remember. That's when someone handed him a live cat. I'm going to keep this short because holy shit, that's a living animal, but he ate the damned thing, and half an hour later, he barfed up the cat's hair and nothing else. And so Tarrare's transformation into an X-Files villain of the week was complete.

After opening the set in front of his doctor friends with a banger like Eating Whole Cats Alive, Tarrare just had to keep the jams coming. In the time he was studied, he's reported to have eaten everything from puppies to a dinner meant for 15 German laborers. He swallowed a live eel without chewing. The doctors noted that his stomach, when empty, was comprised of so much loose skin that he could practically lasso it around himself. They also wrote that "He often stank to such a degree that he could not be endured within the distance of twenty paces."

Again, these tales aren't outlandish bullshit from the playbill of his freak show, but from the notes of trained scientists.

He was captured almost immediately.

Yes, somehow, the Prussian troops took notice of a man with a nightmare face walking around not speaking the same language as everybody else. Scared and with spy things inside him, Tarrare spilled the beans. His captors chained him up in a bathroom and anxiously awaited the code brown. And when he finally passed along the message and some poor soul had to retrieve it, they were infuriated to find that the note said basically nothing of any value. It was simply a test to see if Tarrare's asshole could be a viable weapon of war.

Tarrare's captors were angry because they waited for this creepy guy to shit out a message that was of no value, and Tarrare felt betrayed to have wasted his talents on such an insignificant letter. The Prussians then led Tarrare to his execution, and let him get right up to the point of being convinced that they were going to kill him before having the kind of laugh that only fake executions and true human terror can generate. He was released and allowed to return to France.

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Though, by staying in a hospital, Tarrare found himself back in his sweet spot where he could roam around in the middle of the night and nibble on things he really shouldn't be nibbling on. Convinced that they would not find a cure, Tarrare "relapsed" and started drinking the blood of other patients, and enjoyed a few bites of morgue corpse too. For some reason, other people in the hospital wanted to kick him out. Prudes.

Yet the doctor who was studying Tarrare didn't have the heart to do it. There was still so much exploitin' to do. And then a 14-month-old baby went missing, and I don't want to point fingers, but it might've been the corpse-chewing guy.

Tarrare would fall off the map for a few years, until resurfacing and dying at a hospital in 1798 due to tuberculosis. They did an autopsy, maybe to see if there was a family of hungry gremlins living in there, but all they found was a hugely oversized stomach and a whole lot of infections. That's actually as far as the doctor made it, because he found "the stench of the body insupportable," and despite his role as a professional cutter-opener of smelly dead people, this one was a step too far.

Tarrare died as he lived: an absolute marvel that defied all explanation. Though there have been many other famous gluttons in the past, there has seemingly never been one as insatiable and as capable of really fucking up some "food" in the way that this guy was. So the next time you're looking at the last chicken wing in a plate of 40, think about Tarrare and throw that shit down the hatch.

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