The Man Who Ate Everything Else

During the French Revolutionary Wars, the army surgeons stationed at Soultz had seen a great deal. They had not seen anything like Tarrare.

He was thin — gaunt, even — with skin that hung loose from his frame like a coat several sizes too large. His mouth could hold a dozen eggs at once. He could eat a meal intended for fifteen soldiers in a single sitting, and when meals weren't available, he ate whatever was. Cats. Snakes. Live puppies. He swallowed them whole. He was, by every medical standard available at the time, impossible.

The military saw an opportunity. A man who could swallow anything could swallow documents. They had Tarrare ingest a wooden box containing a test message, waited for it to pass through him, and declared the experiment a success. He was sent behind Prussian lines with a note to a French colonel hidden in his gut.

He was captured almost immediately. He did not speak German. The Prussians beat him, nearly hanged him, and sent him back. The spy program was quietly discontinued.

Tarrare returned to a hospital in Versailles, where he begged doctors to cure his hunger. A toddler disappeared from the ward. He was expelled. He was twenty-six when he died, likely of tuberculosis.

The surgeons who opened his body found his gullet was so wide they could see straight down into his stomach, as though peering into a tunnel.

The smell was so terrible they abandoned the autopsy before finishing it.