In the unsavoury annals of polyphagy, the worst glutton of all time was the Frenchman known as Tarrare. It is not known if Tarrare was his real name or a nickname, but it has survived in such expressions as “Bom-bom tarare!” and “Tarrare bom-de-ay!” referring to powerful explosions or fanfares and, by inference Tarrare’s own prodigious flatulence….
For years, [Tarrare] wandered the French provinces in the company of robbers and whores and as an attention-getting act for an itinerant quack, swallowing stones, whole apples and live animals before the mountebank’s spiel about his wonder-drugs.
In 1788, he reached Paris, to earn a perilous living by means of similar performances in the streets of the French capital. During the revolutionary wars in France, Tarrare joined the army but was driven to desperation by his raging hunger. Exhausted, despite quadruple rations and habitual foraging among dustbins and gutters, he came to the attention of the military surgeons. Among their experiments, Tarrare was given a live cat, which he devoured after tearing its abdomen with his teeth and drinking its blood. He later vomited the fur and the skin. The doctors also fed him live puppies, snakes, lizards and other animals, and Tarrare refused nothing. Contrary to the imagined stereotype of a glutton, Tarrare was pale, thin and of medium height, and of apathetic temperament. His fair hair was uncommonly soft; his mouth enormously wide; and the enamel of the teeth much stained. He sweated profusely and was always surrounded by a malodorous stench which got even worse after his nauseating feasts. Professor Percy wrote that the methods utilized by “this filthy glutton” to make his rations last were too disgusting to be described in detail and “dogs and cats fled in terror at his aspect” as if they knew what fate he was preparing for them.
–from Jan Bondeson’s “The Cat Eaters,” the Fortean Times
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