Tarrare was a French soldier and showman, known for her unusual eating habits. Since a young age, she was able to eat a quarter of her own weight in beef, what made her family kick her out of their house, unable to provide for her. She traveled France with a band of thieves and whores, before becoming the warm-up to a traveling charlatan. In Paris, she became a street performer. She ate corks, stones, baskets of apples, and even snakes.
She later joined the French Revolutionary Army, where she’d eat from gutters and refuse heaps, unsatisfied with the military rations. Eventually, she had to be hospitalized, suffering from exhaustion. Her eating capacity was tested with medical experiments. She ate cats, snakes, lizards, a meal for 15 people, and a whole eel without chewing. Seeing this exceptional ability, the general Alexandre de Beauharanais thought it could be used with military purposes. He made Tarrare eat a box that contained documents, and after they were defecated in one piece, he decided to make her a courier. During a demonstration for the commanders of the Army of the Rhine, Tarrare ate 14 kg of raw bull’s lungs. She was then ordered to carry a message to a French colonel imprisoned by the Prussians near Neustadt, but was discovered due to her inability to speak German. She was imprisoned and forced to release the message, which was actually just a confirmation request for the colonel. Tarrare was beaten and almost executed, but was released at the last minute.
After this unfortunate event, Tarrare wanted to avoid the military service. She returned to the hospital, where she asked for a cure to her eating disorder. Any attempt to regulate her appetite was unsuccessful. She’d sneak out to scavenge offal from butcheries and carrion that only stray dogs would normally eat. More than one time, she was found trying to eat the corpses of the morgue. The doctors pressed her friend, Baron Percy, to send her to a mental asylum, but he refused. In the end, Percy was unable to defend her, after the disappearance of a 14-month-old child.
Four years later, Tarrare had to be interned again, bedridden and weak. She thought the cause of her weak state was a golden fork that she took from a gutter two years before, but it was actually tuberculosis. A month later, she passed away, suffering from exudative diarrhea. The dissection showed that the corpse was full of pus, with a large liver and gallbladder, and a stomach full of ulcers that filled almost all her abdomen. The fork was never found.