In the autumn of 1792, a twenty-year-old French Revolutionary Army private was given a small wooden box containing secret military dispatches and ordered to swallow it. He swallowed the box. He crossed the Rhine into Prussian territory. He was captured. He was beaten for two days. He passed the box. He returned to the French side and threw up the dispatches at the General's tent. The General was Alexandre de Beauharnais.

His name was Tarrare. He had no last name. He had been born in Lyon around 1772 and thrown out at thirteen because his parents could no longer afford to feed him. By that age he could already eat his own body weight in raw beef in a single day. He had wandered the French countryside with thieves and travelling carnival performers, eating live snakes, baskets of corks, and small live cats whole to earn a living.

In 1791 he enlisted in the French Revolutionary Army. His regimental colonel could not feed him on the standard ration of one and a half pounds of bread a day. The Army surgeon of the Army of the Rhine, Dr Pierre-François Percy, took Tarrare on for formal medical observation. Dr Percy and his colleagues at the military hospital at Soultz-sous-Forêts documented him eating fifteen pounds of raw beef in a single sitting, whole apples not chewed but swallowed, a basket of corks, a live water snake, and a still-bleeding bull's stomach. After the dispatch-box mission Tarrare was discharged from the army. He spent the next six years wandering France, begging at hospitals for food. He died in 1798, at twenty-six, of tuberculosis and acute diarrhoea, at the Versailles hospital.

The autopsy was conducted by the chief surgeon of the Versailles hospital, Professor Tessier. The case report records: the esophagus was abnormally wide; the stomach occupied almost the entire abdominal cavity; the intestines were so distended and putrefied that the surgeons could not complete the autopsy and had it suspended on the grounds of overwhelming odour. Dr Pierre-François Percy published the full case in the Journal de médecine, chirurgie, pharmacie in 1805. The journal is preserved at the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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