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Tarrare (c. 1772 – 1798), sometimes spelled Tarare, was a French showman and soldier, noted for his unusual eating habits. Able to eat vast amounts of meat, he was constantly hungry; his parents could not provide for him, and he was turned out of the family home as a teenager. He travelled France in the company of a band of thieves and prostitutes, before becoming the warm-up act to a travelling charlatan; he would swallow corks, stones, live animals and a whole basketful of apples. He then took this act to Paris where he worked as a street performer. At the start of the War of the First Coalition Tarrare joined the French Revolutionary Army. With military rations unable to satisfy his large appetite, he would eat any available food from gutters and refuse heaps but his condition still deteriorated through hunger. Suffering from exhaustion, he was hospitalised and became the subject of a series of medical experiments to test his eating capacity, in which, among other things, he ate a meal intended for 15 people in a single sitting, ate live cats, snakes, lizards and puppies, and swallowed an eel whole without chewing. Despite his unusual diet, he was of normal size and appearance, and showed no signs of mental illness other than what was described as an apathetic temperament. General Alexandre de Beauharnais decided to put Tarrare's abilities to use, and he was employed as a courier by the French army, with the intention that he would swallow documents, pass through enemy lines, and recover them from his stool once safely at his destination. Unfortunately for Tarrare, he could not speak German, and on his first mission was captured by Prussian forces, severely beaten and underwent a mock execution before being returned to French lines. Chastened by this experience, he agreed to submit to any procedure that would cure his appetite, and was treated with laudanum, tobacco pills, wine vinegar and soft-boiled eggs. The procedures failed, and doctors could not keep him on a controlled diet; he would sneak out of the hospital to scavenge for offal in gutters, rubbish heaps and outside butchers' shops, and attempted to drink the blood of other patients in the hospital and to eat the corpses in the hospital morgue. After falling under suspicion of eating a toddler he was ejected from the hospital. He reappeared four years later in Versailles suffering from severe tuberculosis, and died shortly afterwards, following a lengthy bout of exudative diarrhoea. ==Childhood and early life== Tarrare was born in rural France, near Lyon, around 1772. His date of birth is unrecorded and it is not even known if Tarrare was his real name or a nickname. As a child, Tarrare had a huge appetite and by his teens could eat a quarter of a bullock, weighing as much as Tarrare himself, in a single day. By this time, his parents could not provide for him and had forced him to leave home.〔 For some years after this, he toured the country with a roaming band of thieves and prostitutes, begging and stealing for food,〔 before gaining employment as a warm-up act to a travelling charlatan. Tarrare would draw a crowd by eating corks, stones and live animals, and by swallowing an entire basketful of apples one after the other.〔 He would eat ravenously and was particularly fond of snake meat.〔 In 1788, Tarrare moved to Paris to work as a street performer. He appears to have been successful in general, but on one occasion the act went wrong and he suffered severe intestinal obstruction. Members of the crowd carried him to the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, where he was treated with powerful laxatives. He made a full recovery and offered to demonstrate his act by eating his surgeon's watch and chain; M. Giraud, the surgeon, was unimpressed by the offer and warned him that if he did so, he would cut Tarrare open to recover the items. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tarrare」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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