Tarrare (ca. 1772 - 1798)
The living incarnation of Horror Hunger.
The individual known only as "Tarrare" was a French sideshow performer, soldier, and genuine freak of nature. An oddity that baffled the medical community of his day, he was equal parts tragic figure and repulsive monster. Come with us on this journey, if you dare.
History tells us little about Tarrare's origins or early life; Tarrare wasn't even his real name, but a nickname derived from... well, we'll cover that soon. He was born sometime around 1772, in a rural area near Lyon. There wasn't much remarkable about his childhood, but as he grew older, it became clear that there was something... different about him. Namely, his ravenous, insatiable appetite. He was constantly hungry, and never seemed to be able to put on weight. It was said that he could eat his weight in food on a daily basis (since he never weighed more than 100 pounds, that's not huge, but still) but he could never be satisfied. Food seemed to just go right through him in the form of constant, extreme diarrhea. That's apparently where the nickname "Tarrare" came from: "tarrare" is a French onomatopoeia for an explosion, roughly equivalent to the English word "kaboom". Supposedly, he stank so badly that people couldn't get within twenty feet of him for fear of passing out. He was also, unsurprisingly, weird looking: according to contemporary accounts, he had skin that would hang off him so loosely that he could wrap it around him, a mouth big enough to hold a dozen eggs, eyes so bloodshot that they looked red in color, and lips so colorless that they could be invisible. Between his bottomless appetite and horrific body odor, it was only a matter of time until Tarrare was literally eating his parents out of house and home, and they were forced to throw him out.
Now homeless, Tarrare made his way through the French countryside, living as best he could — which meant begging, stealing, and occasionally rummaging through trash — until he took up work as a sideshow performer in Paris. He could, and would, eat anything people gave him, including rocks, corks, pieces of flint, and live animals. Needless to say, this caught up with him one day and he was treated for a bowel obstruction. In 1792, a year after the War of the First Coalition began, Tarrare, feeling the call of patriotism, enlisted to fight for France.
The problem with this became obvious almost immediately: Tarrare was absolutely useless as a soldier. He couldn't survive on military rations (even after being granted quadruple the amount soldiers were normally allowed) and his other physical and psychological issues meant he couldn't fight at all. While suffering from an extreme case of exhaustion, he was admitted to a military hospital in Soultz-Haut-Rhin and ordered to take part in treatments with the hope of identifying the cause of his behavior. Unfortunately for Tarrare, most of the doctors there saw him as more of a scientific curiosity to be observed, rather than, you know, a human being suffering from an unusual medical condition, so their "treatments" mainly consisted of putting things in front of him and watching what happened. Results were about as gross and off-putting as you could imagine; there was almost nothing Tarrare wouldn't try to eat, if only to finally feel full and satiated.
Some of the things he devoured during these experiments included a live eel, a live cat, and a huge dinner meant to feed 15 people (after which he just went into some kind of anaconda-after-eating-a-wild-boar coma for a few hours). Besides his eating habits, Tarrare showed no obvious signs of mental illness besides what was described as an apathetic temperament. After several months, Tarrare was pressed to return to military service; there was an attempt to make use of him as a spy and a courier, by feeding him a box with a secret message inside and then... well, letting nature take its course. Of course, this failed miserably; whichever French Army intelligence officer thought that sending a freakish-looking, mentally unstable man who didn't speak a word of German deep into Prussian territory was a brilliant plan clearly hadn't thought things through.
After being captured and tortured by the Prussian Army, and then finding out that the secret message he'd been "holding onto" was simply a test message asking to confirm that it had been received, Tarrare finally realized that maybe he wasn't cut out for military life. Upon being given a mock execution and sent on his way, he returned to Soultz-Haut-Rhin, hoping to find a cure to his condition, and was placed under the care of renowned surgeon Pierre-François Percy. Unlike the previous doctors he'd seen, Percy genuinely did want to help Tarrare rather than merely study him, and he employed the best treatments 18th century French medicine had to offer. Unfortunately, the best treatments 18th century French medicine had to offer weren't all that effective, even for average, everyday illnesses, so trying to treat a condition as unprecedented as Tarrare's was a stab in the dark at best. Attempted treatments included doping him up with opium and tobacco, employing vinegars and mineral waters, and, bizarrely, stuffing him full of soft-boiled eggs. Nothing worked.
To exacerbate matters, Tarrare's condition soon took a turn for the worse, causing him to grow more and more desperate to find anything to satisfy his all-consuming hunger. He started sneaking out of the hospital at night, raiding butcher shops for offal and garbage. He would eat roadkill, sometimes fighting with stray dogs over it. The hospital staff also caught him several times either drinking blood from patients undergoing bloodletting or trying to eat corpses from the morgue. Nevertheless, Percy stood by his patient, determined to protect him from persecution... But the final drop came when an infant went missing, and Tarrare was instantly accused of it.
They were never able to prove it (and the infant reportedly turned up unharmed after the fact), but the damage was already done. Percy was either unable or unwilling to defend Tarrare any longer, and the story goes that the staff chased him away from the hospital. Tarrare's whereabouts for the next four years are unknown, but he resurfaced in 1798 when a hospital in Versailles reached out to Percy, saying a patient of theirs wished to see him. It was Tarrare, now bedridden and extremely weak. He initially believed a golden fork he had eaten two years earlier was lodged in his stomach, but Percy recognized that he was actually suffering from advanced tuberculosis. A month later, Tarrare finally passed away at the apparent age of twenty-six.
To this day, we have no idea exactly what was wrong with Tarrare. An autopsy was done, revealing several abnormally enlarged organs (it's said that when they forced his mouth open, they could see straight to his stomach, which filled most of his abdomen), but the medical science of the time could only yield so much information. Besides which, Tarrare's body apparently almost immediately began to rot and decompose, and the horrified doctors initially refused to perform the autopsy at all (they never found the fork, by the way). Theories include an extreme case of hyperthyroidism, Prader-Willi Syndrome, uncontrolled diabetes, or damage to his brain's limbic system, but no single diagnosis could account for the entirety of his behavior. This, combined with accounts of his strange physical appearance, has led to all kinds of legends and wild speculations about Tarrare. Was he mentally ill? Was he some kind of mutant? Was he a demon? We simply don't know, and we probably never will. All we know is that his is one of history's weirdest true stories.
Due to the bizarre and macabre nature of his story, Tarrare has something of a cult following in art and avant-garde circles. He's the subject of short films, stage plays, metal concept albums, and even a few puppet shows.
Tropes of Tarrare
Tarrare's depictions in works of art and folklore include the following:
- Ambiguously Human: Given Tarrare's strange appearance and behavior, there's a question of whether or not he was even human. Some puppet shows, of course, take this to a logical extreme, depicting him as something out of Jim Henson's fever dreams. But the list of very strange things about his anatomy included.
- A lipless mouth that stretched across his entire jawline.
- Bloodshot eyes, which were said to be constantly fully red.
- His literal ability to eat and digest anything (including a golden fork, apparently).
- His inhumanly sized stomach and overly developed digestive system.
- His stench, which made him near unapproachable.
- And, finally, at the end of his life, his body decayed far quicker than that a normal human.
- Balloon Belly: His abdomen was described to distend "like a huge balloon" whenever he was full, and apparently was so overstretched it would hang loosely like folds when it was empty.
- Body Horror: And how. The two tropes above are only scraping the surface. One could even wonder how he managed to survive for so long with such a horrific diet, since the things that he consumed would and should seriously mess up the digestive system, if not the entire body, such as whole eels with their needle-like bones and toxic blood or human corpses and the blood of hospital patients, which carry all sorts of diseases. Sure enough, when Tarrare died and was given an autopsy, his digestive system was in pretty bad shape, with his abdomen being filled with pus, organs abnormally large, and stomach covered in ulcers.
- Big Eater: One of the biggest in history. But due to his screwed-up metabolism, he never put on weight.
- Diagnosed by the Audience: We'll probably never know what was wrong with him. Malformed digestive tract? Damaged amygdala? A witch's curse? It's all up for grabs.
- Eats Babies: Maybe. Certainly he was very much suspected when a toddler disappeared from the hospital he was staying at.
- Epic Fail: Tarrare's military career, for so many reasons.
- Extreme Omnivore: His desperation to be full meant that he would eat just about anything people would put in front of him. That made him a great sideshow attraction, but...
- Gasshole: He was known for burping and farting very loudly, which is also one of the reasons he was called "Tarrare".
- Horror Hunger: As his mental state deteriorated, Tarrare turned to more and more bizarre and disturbing things to eat.
- I Am a Humanitarian: in real life, maybe. In stage plays, definitely, though most depictions limit Tarrare to eating corpses, and sidestep the whole "possibly ate a baby" thing.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: No one bothered to record Tarrare's thoughts - least of all Tarrare himself - so we have no idea what motivated him to join the French Army, despite his clear shortcomings as a soldier. Some depictions of him attribute this to a desire to be remembered as something other than a circus freak.
- Noodle Incident: While going back to the hospital suffering from late stage tuberculosis, Tarrare initially believed his illness was due to a golden fork he had swallowed; during his autopsy the fork was never found.
- The Pig-Pen: Was said to have stained teeth and smell unusually foul even by 18th century rural France standards.
- Riddle for the Ages: What, exactly, was wrong with him? His contemporaries couldn't figure it out, and there's been no other known cases like his.
- The Stoic: His contemporaries said that he had an apathetic temperament with "a complete lack of force and ideas".
- Tragic Monster: A disturbing and disgusting individual driven to this behavior by his own body.
- Too Dumb to Live: Tarrare was not a very intelligent man. During his brief stint as a French spy into German territory, he was quickly approached by enemy soldiers who asked him who he was and what he was doing there in German because they were German. Tarrare replied to them in French. Then again, you have to wonder why the military thought it would be a good idea to assign him that role.
- Worst Aid: Most of the doctors treating Tarrare had no real interest in curing him, just observing his curious behavior. The ones that actually did try to help him weren't really able to do much better, considering this was the late 18th century and medical science hadn't progressed very far past bloodletting and trepanation. But, really, soft-boiled eggs?
- Would Hurt a Child: If the baby eating story is believed to be true.
Works Featuring or Referencing Tarrare
- The X-Files: Rob Roberts, Monster of the Week in the episode "Hungry", is inspired by Tarrare: a human with abnormal physical features and an overwhelming compulsion to eat. In Roberts' case, his physical mutations make him look like a humanoid shark, with black eyes, hairless grey flesh, and rows of sharp teeth (which he conceals with wigs and prosthetics). He manages to be a bit more functional than Tarrare was, due to access to therapy and medication unavailable in the 18th century, but ultimately he finds he cannot control his cravings and ends up committing Suicide by Cop rather than kill more people.
- Swallow the Stars, an opera written by American composer Patricia Wallinga, uses the true story of Tarrare as a springboard for a more fantastical tale.
- Appears in an episode of Less is Morgue, wherein he is very insistent that he didn't eat that baby...
- The British theatrical musical The Depraved Appetite of Tarrare the Freak, which depicts Tarrare as a very creepy singing puppet.
- Featured in an episode of Sam O'Nella Academy, "The Hungriest Man in History".
