Real Life Superpowers: Tarrare - The Man Who Could Eat Anything

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Beauharnais tested Tarrare's potential ability as a message carrier with an experiment. He placed a written letter inside a wooden box, made Tarrare devour it whole, then tasked some unfortunate grunt with the unenviable errand of having to determine whether the note was still legible once it came out the other end.

With the excretion experiment completed, Tarrare had proved his worth as a potential spy and was tasked with travelling into Prussia disguised as a local peasant, with orders to deliver a digested message to a captured French colonel.

Now, while having incredible bowels is obviously an impressive feat, generally there are a few more prerequisites required when attempting to successfully commit espionage in a foreign nation. Namely, it really helps to speak the lingo if you don't want to stick out like a sore thumb the moment you find yourself behind enemy lines.

Unfortunately for our hapless hero, his sagging skin and putrid stench didn't really help him blend into his surroundings and his total lack of German meant that it didn't take long for Tarrare to be captured by Prussian authorities.

After being tortured for nearly 24 hours for his internal information, Tarrare admitted he was carrying a secret message and was forced to wait by a latrine, with another unfortunate, now Prussian, grunt being forced to excavate the evidence upon arrival. However, when the message finally arrived, it turned out that the letter only asked the recipient if Tarrare had been successful in delivering it.

After being mercilessly tortured in service of his country, Tarrare's message had been little more than a test of competency from Beauharnais.

Presumably seeing the funny side of the whole ordeal, the Prussian general allowed Tarrare to return back to French lines, but only after putting the fear of God in him with a mock execution.

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