Tarrare does not remember his name, his face or a time in his life when he wasn’t hungry. Not hungry: starving. He looks down at his body and sees an empty sack of skin stretched over a well. 

Of course, Tarrare cannot eat forever. Tarrare is human, even if he looks more like a jaundiced newt. And rocks and twigs and corks aren’t good for him, so after he runs out of rancid sour apples he ties his hands to a chair until he vomits out of sheer frustration. 

Tarrare is human, he repeats to himself, while licking the juicy bile off the floor. Tarrare is human.

Tarrare wakes up in a scratchy hospital to the cold brittle scent of gold. A pocket-watch on the end of a chain is standing over him with a bloodied scalpel, wearing an expression of blank curiosity that shifts to horror upon seeing him awake. 

“Il ne devrait pas être réveillé!”, it shouts to a syringe. 

 Panicked, the syringe stammers “Désolé! Désolé!”. Tarrare barely has enough time to glance down at the red mess of his abdomen before it plunges itself into his thigh. Darkness starts to close in. His last thoughts before unconsciousness are that he’d like to drink from that gash in his stomach. 

Tarrare is sitting up in bed, swigging a bowl of lard. Next to him, the same pocket-watch from before is scribbling furiously. Ink sloshes in a pot next to it.  Tarrare gestures to it.

“May I?”

The pocket-watch pauses, eyes flickering between the man and the bottle. Then it smirks.

“Oui.”

Tarrare washes down the lard with watery ink. He feels it stain his rotted teeth, and grins at the syringe ghoulishly, who blanches and turns away quickly. 

“Obliged.”

The pocket-watch nods, then taps its pen against its notebook. “Quelles sont les limites de votre appétit?”

Tarrare grins again. “I could swallow a watch, if a demonstration’s what you want.”

Unamused, the pocket-watch holds up a scalpel and raises its eyebrows meaningfully.
“Non, merci.”

Later, he hears the pocket-watch muttering to a deep shadowy hat. Tarrare can’t hear exactly what they’re saying, but the hat continuously interrupts and pokes its head at the pocket-watch’s notebook. 

The pocket-watch moves its hand around its stomach, and the hat cranes its neck around to look at Tarrare. Looking down, he sees that somebody took the time to tie his loose belly around his waist like a belt, and that familiar sense of consuming need re-enters his body. Tarrare rings the bell by his bed, alerting the pocket-watch who gestures that the hat should follow him.

“Vous devriez voir ceci,” says the pocket-watch, and produces a velvet cloth tied with a golden rope. Pulling the cord, the cloth collapses around itself to reveal twelve brand-new candles. Tarrare beholds them greedily. The hat looks at him, a disbelieving smile
 tugging at its mouth. 

“Ici, mon garçon. Attrape!”

The pocket-watch throws him the candles. Tarrare catches them in his oversized gullet, swallows three of them like a pelican and grinds the rest into gloopy fat that sticks to his teeth. He flosses with a leftover wick, then eats that too. The hat is stunned.

“Incroyable!”, it mutters to itself. “Et il mangerait
n’importe quoi?”

“Anything,” affirms Tarrare, before the pocket-watch can speak. “I will eat anything.”

Tarrare is sitting up in bed when Pierre-François Percy, his new doctor, gusts into the room with arms full of food. The pocket-watch is barely a memory by now. Tarrare wishes that he had been allowed to try the gold. He wonders what it would have tasted like.

Percy is fascinated by Tarrare, and also partly in love with him:  as a subject more than a man, Tarrare believes. Where people usually shudder in their souls to touch Tarrare’s waxen skin, Percy caresses his arm like a sculpture. His eyes shine feverishly, like they are sweating, and his nostrils do not flare at Tarrare’s odour, which Tarrare knows anecdotally to be pungent beyond measure. 

For his part, Tarrare assesses Percy with the dependent aloofness of a legless, hairless cat. Certainly, a part of him jumps excitedly when Percy enters a room, and certainly, part of him cradles those loving glances, but more to Tarrare’s liking are the tests themselves. Percy brings him delicious treats: meat pies, milk; bowls of grease sprinkled with salt, boiled bones, chicken carcasses; rats from the hospital cat with their legs still whirring spasmodically – there is no limit to Percy’s infatuation, and no limit either to the gustative riches with which he expresses that infatuation. It is a good relationship, decides Tarrare, sucking thoughtfully at some marrow. 

The hat appears throughout, lurking in the corner; speaking with a concerned-looking Percy and frequently interrupting his weak protests. It considers Tarrare a non-entity, and talks through him as such: crouching down as if speaking to an infant, or a pet.

“Pouvez-vous me comprendre?” it asks, slowly.

Tarrare looks at the hat. Its eyes are dark, and he can see himself reflected in them, a frail grinning ghostly figure with hair falling out. He looks down at himself and sees his apron of skin, hanging deflated and lifeless from his belly. He sees Percy wipe a tear from his eye. Tarrare feels nothing. He is an observer in his own life, driven by hunger. 

The hat is still waiting for an answer. “Vous comprenez?”

“Yes,” answers Tarrare. “I understand you.”

Percy fusses over him for days. He gives him barrels of slimy entrails, noting down how Tarrare’s stomach inflates like a balloon. He gives him a wheelbarrow of lungs and liver and murmurs to the stricken syringes and stethoscopes as he inhales every droplet. The treats keep coming. Massive pie dishes filled with raw dough, flasks of stinking cream, skin ripped fresh from the back of a horse, ground bones sprinkled over turnips – Tarrare was happy to eat it all. 

And Tarrare notices an audience growing too. Gradually at first, an apprentice bringing a girlfriend: and then later Tarrare sees the hat being slipped jangling purses in return for – he assumes – access to Tarrare. One day, an elegant bonnet comes in, blanches at the smell then leaves.

Tarrare likes the attention. It makes Percy jealous enough to continuously up the

ante in terms of culinary spectacle, and soon enough he starts putting on a show for the onlookers, baring his canines, maintaining eye contact through the liquid mist and so on. 

This could be a life, considers Tarrare, as his last fans leave for the day. This could be a life.

Tarrare is on a stage. There is a burning blinding light focused on him. He is naked, except for a loincloth. He can see eyes refracted like millions of stars, pupils dilated and locked on him. At his feet is a cage where something whines and growls. He cannot see inside it. 

The hat had just introduced him, only two minutes after he arrived. A drum roll is gently pulsing behind him. The air smells like thick feet and stale dust. Tarrare is hungry,
like always.

He opens the lid of the cage. A cat, little more than a kitten, trots out. Tarrare licks dry lips.

Tarrare is still hungry. He fights dogs outside butchers for offal and feeds on their puppies. He has sucked the bones of fox cubs. He has snapped the spines of rats and crushed their heads with his molars. When he tells his stories, people no longer react with shocked glee, but with disgust. And Percy…Tarrare can sense when his charm is wearing thin. Percy is realising that Tarrare is not an eccentric, but a chasm. 

Tarrare recalls when he would tie himself to chairs to stop himself from gorging, when the worst things he’d eat were rotten but not unholy. And, remembering that time on the filthy kitchen floor, Tarrare repeats his mantra: Tarrare is human, Tarrare is human, Tarrare is human, as he gnaws at the corpse on the mortuary slab.

Tarrare cannot get the sound the cat made out of his head. It was curious, plaintive, then frightened, then agonised. He cannot forget the way its blood felt on his chin either, after it had dried and become a brown crispy residue. His hands clench and unclench, as if grasping its wiry scruff over and over again. 

When Percy comes with his clipboard, Tarrare speaks before the doctor has a chance to say hello. 

“Percy. Percy, I don’t…I don’t want to be hungry anymore.” Tarrare’s wide mouth parts into a grimace. “Please, Percy. Cure me. Fix me. I’ll do anything.”

Percy looks at him, aghast. “Non. Non, Tarrare, je le ne peux pas faire.”

Tarrare scrambles out of bed and crawls towards his friend. His stomach drags behind him, collecting dust. He grabs the hem of Percy’s white coat. Percy recoils.

“I beg you. I beg you.”

Tarrare wraps himself in a dark linen shawl so that he looks like a person, not a thing, and lopes down the hospital halls. 

Percy tried tobacco pills. He tried dieting. He tried starvation, abuse, vinegar and laudanum; but the more cures failed, the deeper the lines on his forehead embedded themselves. Eventually, he told Tarrare he was leaving. He had learned all he could from Tarrare, he said, mais tu es devenu
monstrueux. Monstrous. 

Tarrare is human.

The pocket watch left in a carriage. The hat has unravelled. All that remains is Tarrare and his black hunger. 

A small object cannons into Tarrare, causing him to stagger backwards. Steadying it, Tarrare looks down, and a tiny beaming face looks back at him. A tiny, plump, flushed face. 

“Salut! Je m’appelle _____! Comment t’appelle tu?”

Tarrare looks at _____. His mouth fills with saliva. He eyes the storeroom. Nobody goes there at this time of day.

The toddler is still smiling at him. “Comment t’appelle tu?”

Tarrare is so hungry.

Tarrare staggers through the street, openly weeping, stinking of the excrement people throw at him. All these red shrieking faces surround him, deafen him. He wants help. Nobody comes close, though. Nobody dares. 

“Bêtê! Bêtê!” Beast. Beast. Tarrare is human. Tarrare is human. Tarrare est une bêtê.

“Please!” howls Tarrare. “Please! Anything! I will eat anything! I’m hungry, I’m so hungry. You don’t have to pay me, I just want to eat!”

A lump of shit lands at his feet. Next to it, a jagged rusty fork. Tarrare picks up both. “I just want to eat!”, he screams, through stained teeth and a leaking mouth. Tarrare is human. Tarrare is human. Tarrare est une homme.

Il est une homme.