Jacques Simon

Jacques de Falaise (stage name of Jacques Simon; 1754 – 30 March 1825) was a French quarryman who became famous in the early 19th century for his ingestion skills.

First hired by conjurer Louis Comte at his Paris theater in 1816, he became famous for a few years for his "polyphagic experiments", during which he ingested nuts, pipes, unshelled hard-boiled eggs, flowers with their stems, watches, and live animals such as mice, sparrows, eels, and crayfish. Forced to stop his exploits by several bouts of gastroenteritis, he committed suicide in 1825. His autopsy was the subject of a memoir widely circulated in Europe, which concluded that Jacques de Falaise was not endowed with exceptional digestive organs, and that he indulged in his exercises out of a desire to shine, rather than a depraved appetite. He is considered the "ancestor" of circus "merycists".

Biography

Montmartre maneuver Jacques Simon was born in 1754 in Baumière, Normandy, on the banks of the river Ante, near Falaise, from which he derived his nickname "Jacques de Falaise". Almost nothing is known about the first sixty years of his life, other than that he worked as a quarryman in the plaster quarries of Montmartre, a trade that enabled him to develop "very considerable muscular strength" and "robust health", According to doctor Beaudé's Mémoire, who performed an autopsy on Jacques Simon in 1825, he was challenged one day in a cabaret to swallow the owner's canary, "despite the strong protests of the bird's owner", and swallowed it in one go, which surprised him the most, declaring: "I didn't think I'd swallow it at all, and I was quite surprised to see it go down so easily". "keys, crosses, rings", then "live animals, which passed through with the same ease". which we see performed with ever-new surprise and awe, is proof of the power of long habit" Jacques Simon's artistic career was an indirect consequence of the success of a trio of Indian jugglers who, "after having won the admiration of London", performed in Paris, rue de Castiglione, during the winter of 1815–1816. In addition to escamotage and juggling, their sword-swallowing act was particularly noteworthy. According to Anglès's , this trick "consisted on slowly introducing a sword into the esophagus as far as the stomach, and perhaps even into the cavity of this viscera, a well-polished iron blade, the width of which was about half an inch [1.27 cm] at its tip, then increased little by little; so that it was at least an inch [2.54 cm]. This blade was a line and a half thick [3 mm]; all the angles were rounded with great care, and the Indian would push it into his gullet with great care, after first coating it with saliva and passing it over his tongue".

Swiss-born Louis Comte was a famous magician and ventriloquist, known as the "king's physicist" for having charmed Louis XVIII with his "experiments" in "amusing physics". The prestidigitator was also a shrewd businessman, always on the lookout for attractions that would serve "as an interlude to goblet tricks and ventriloquist illusions" and helped make his theater "an inexhaustible reservoir of tricks and juggling of all kinds".

Having heard of the Montmartre quarryman's talents, he saw an opportunity to capitalize on the vogue for Indian jugglers, and had him approached by his steward, a certain Mr. Godin, who "made the Indian sword shine" in the worker's eyes and aroused in him "a love of glory". summed up Jacques's joy by pastiching a tirade by Francaleu in :

Louis Comte's recruitment of Jacques Simon came with leonine conditions, as he agreed, "for 400 francs a year, food and clothing, to swallow, for five years, and in public, any objects presented to him". The five-franc silver coin measured 37 mm in diameter and weighed 25 g. By swallowing around 50 of these coins in one go, Jacques de Falaise ingested around 1.25 kg of silver, at the cost of a "dangerous intestinal inflammation". After "a few weeks of practice under the eyes of his new boss", a learned word for "swallowing everything", as one work of the period put it, at the risk of being "trivial", to put himself "within the reach of all readers". To the amazement of the audience, he swallowed for a quarter of an hour, "very resolutely" whole potatoes or walnuts, unshelled eggs, a pipe bowl, small shot glasses, a watch with its chain, three cards rolled together, which he " swallowed without tearing them or crushing them with his teeth", a rose, "with its leaves, its long stem, and its thorns", He readily responded to audience challenges, agreeing to repeat his "experiments" swallowing an English spectator's watch "as well as the chain and three charms hanging from it", or coins. On one occasion, "he had to swallow 300 francs in 5-franc coins, as the poster had announced; but, as by a fair convention, everything that passed through the stomach of our polyphagus became his property, the head of the establishment had only 150 francs available for this purpose, inviting the public to provide the rest, if they wanted to witness the show he had been announced. Twenty or so coins were thrown at him, and he swallowed them all; and if he didn't ingest the advertised 300 francs into his stomach, it was because a crowd of spectators, fearing the consequences of this kind of exercise, wouldn't allow it. The pain caused by the weight and movement of these fifty pieces was so severe that Jacques de Falaise was obliged to clasp his stomach with a wide belt, which he didn't leave until he had passed all the pieces in his stool". The highlight of his show was a repeat of the Indian jugglers' sword-swallowing trick. "Without preparation, very lightly, and without giving the slightest sign of suffering", than the Swiss ventriloquist, and the noted, in the same vein, that "this was the most extraordinary piece in M. Comte's Spectacle, and it was not one of the latter's least clever tricks to have included this universal swallower among the curiosities that drew crowds to his home". Pierre-François Percy and Charles Nicolas Laurent added that "his face showed no trace of painful digestion; it was pale and very wrinkled; he ate a pound of cooked meat at each of his meals, and drank two bottles of wine. He pretended to have a horror of raw flesh, and to be able to swallow only live animals. It is said to excrete solid bodies from below, the debris of birds and mice within twenty-four hours, and it was not until the third day that the undigested portions of eels came out. Its excrement was extremely fetid."

End of career Jacques de Falaise holding a sword in his mouth, a mouse in one hand, an eel in the other, a bird perched on his shoulder. Wood engraving. In August 1816, Jacques gave his last performance at the Théâtre Comte. announced that he was "going to repeat his experiments He was in Lyon in September, where he gave seven performances at the Théâtre des Célestins, always accompanied by his stage manager Godin. The front page of the reported that the famous Jacques de Falaise, "passing through our city on his way to Marseille, did not deny in his experiments the extraordinary things that all the Paris newspapers had told us about this phenomenon of nature". At the end of September, reported, not without irony, that the "polyphagous" was in Marseille, where he swallowed snakes and "didn't earn enough to feed on more delicious dishes". The paper had no doubt, therefore, "that he would hasten back to the capital", especially as an impostor was performing at the Saint-Cloud fair, pretending to be him.

Between 1818 and 1821, Jacques Simon performed regularly in Paris, sometimes at Madame Saqui's theater and more often again at the Théâtre Comte, but also in the provinces. Paul Ginisty, in a biography of Madame Saqui dating from the early 20th century, suggested that Jacques's enthusiasm was not quite the same as in his early days: "with a commanding vivacity, [he] swallowed or pretended to swallow everything the public offered him". deteriorated his health. He was admitted for the first time to the Beaujon hospital, where he was treated for several months for gastroenteritis. He gave up his art and accepted a position as a hospital orderly. he was found hanged in the cellar where he was supposed to be sawing wood.

Medical analysis

Polyphagia, a poorly-explained symptom The first medical use of the French term polyphage, is attributed to Pierre-François Percy, in his 1805 Mémoire sur Tarrare, a famous "living abyss" with "enormous needs" who "went to butcheries and out-of-the-way places, to compete with dogs and wolves for their vile pasture". referred—and "cynorexia" or canine hunger.

As Tarrare had died of "purulent and infectious diarrhea, announcing a general suppuration of the abdominal viscera", In 1811, François-Joseph Double, in his Séméiologie, distinguished polyphagie from pica, considering that hunger could be "depraved" either "when the taste attached itself to one or two strange things, which was pica and malacia; or when it embraced a very large number of them, which was polyphagie".

In 1827, Dr. Ramon, who penned the article "Polyphagia" in the , felt that this term was preferable to omophagia for describing a disease characterized by eating a lot of everything. According to this author, "polyphagia was related sometimes to a particular conformation of the digestive organs, sometimes to inflammatory irritation of the stomach, sometimes to the presence of worms in the intestinal canal, and sometimes to nervous irritation". But in 1839, the English doctor John Gideon Millingen was more cautious about explaining such unusual phenomena: he pointed out that the nature of the digestive process was still uncertain, and felt that "neither physiological experiments carried out while the subjects were alive, nor anatomical investigations carried out after death, had so far made it possible to form an opinion".

To explain cases such as those of Tarrare or Charles Domery, contemporary medicine would rather point to a disorder of the hypothalamus or amygdala. Jan Bondeson noted, however, that "no cases even moderately resembling those of Tarrare and Domery were published in the annals of modern neurology, and it was therefore impossible to determine their correct diagnosis", while adding that the case of Jacques de Falaise was different: according to him, the latter and Bijoux "showed, even by the standards of their contemporaries, clear signs of mental illness".

Doctor's testimonies on Jacques de Falaise First page of the article devoted to Jacques de Falaise by Dr. Frederik Holst in the Norwegian medical journal Eyr in 1828 During Jacques de Falaise's lifetime, several doctors who witnessed his "experiments" admitted that they could not explain his unusual abilities. Pierre-François Percy and Charles Nicolas Laurent, two doctors specializing in polyphagia, in particular the case of Tarrare, who observed Jacques de Falaise in 1816 at the Théâtre Comte, confined themselves to describing his "experiments". Classifying him as an omophagus, they were particularly interested in his relationship with raw meat, noting that the subject seemed to make "no effort, nor even any movement, to kill in his mouth the live animals he was about to swallow"—a statement contradicted by Dr. Beaudé—that he "even boasted of feeling them stir in his stomach" and that he "pretended to abhor raw flesh, and to be able to swallow only live animals". The Norwegian physician Frederik Holst, who witnessed Jacques de Falaise's "experiments" during a stay in Paris in 1820, devoted an article to him in the Norwegian medical journal Eyr in 1828. In it, he reported having observed Jacques de Falaise's exploits during a stay in Paris, having placed himself "very close to the scene, a few cubits from the man, so as to be able to observe him more closely. But none of us could observe anything, except that the objects mentioned were indeed devoured. After this meal, Jacques came down from the stage to speak with the spectators. He said he felt absolutely no stomach pain from these objects, adding that the sparrow had died quickly from asphyxiation and that he had distinctly felt the movements of the eel some time after devouring it, but that everything had then returned to normal, and that the crayfish had been the longest to stop moving, without causing him any pain either. His bowel movements were normal, with everything he had swallowed except the nuts coming out whole. All in all, we were able to observe Jacques for an hour."

Autopsy

On Jacques de Falaise's death, in view of the interest aroused by his "polyphagic experiments", to carry out his autopsy, with the participation of Doctors Beaudé and de Troisvèvre. Dr. Beaudé, who drew "very important conclusions" from the autopsy (communicated to the Paris Medical Athenaeum on 15 April 1826), noted that the pharynx, esophagus and pylorus were of "considerable extent", which, in his opinion, explained the subject's facility in swallowing large objects, but also resulted from it. The stomach was "greatly distended by a considerable quantity of half-digested food", including three longitudinally-rolled playing cards. This highly developed stomach contained fibrous bundles of "extraordinary development", which Beaudé explained by "the need for the stomach to often deploy considerable contractile force, in order to expel from its interior the refractory substances that had been introduced". For his part, Dr. de Troisvèvre, after noting that the subject was "very thin", stressed that he had found "the abdominal organs not very developed", "in a healthy state" and "only a little more dilatable than they usually are". Consequently, the "polyphagic" feats were to be attributed, in his view, solely to the fact that he had "overcome the remoteness and disgust that one ordinarily experiences when ingesting these kinds of bodies in the stomach". Beaudé pointed out that "the stomach acquired a considerable amplitude in people who habitually introduced a large number of foods into it", and that "the bladder often became very large in people accustomed to withholding their urine".

As for the question of "how it happened that a host of bodies, so capable by their shape, weight and nature, of determining an inflammation of the gastrointestinal mucosa, had, for so long, daily irritated the interior of the digestive tract, without more often than not resulting in the onset of gastroenteritis", Beaudé replied that the example of Jacques de Falaise confirmed that "we often exaggerate too much the sensitivity of the stomach, and consequently the influence of external causes, in the production of gastrointestinal inflammations". He added that the scars on Jacques de Falaise's cecum proved that "intestinal ulcerations were far from being as serious as they used to be". On the other hand, he suspected that the state of the digestive tract and the liver, which he noted were dilated, "may have exerted their influence on the cerebral functions, determining the suicide". This depreciation can be compared with the aphorism of an anonymous editor of Le Gastronome: "Jacques de Falaise is the strongest argument against the immortality of the soul".

Posterity

De Falaise never regurgitated what he had swallowed. Because his "polyphagia" was the result of a deliberate habitual practice These artists include: Mac Norton, born Claude Louis Delair, aka the Aquarium Man, of the Rancy circus, reputed to have "the ideal stomach", evoked by Colette in her Journal, who, after starting out as a singer, had, under the influence of his friend Le Pétomane, reconverted to rumination. He would "swallow live frogs and fish, converse for long minutes with the audience, then disgorge, the animals still alive. He sometimes managed to keep the frogs in his digestive tract for 2 hours", Harry Houdini reported that he had once seen him return to his dressing room very worried: "it seemed that he had lost a frog—at least he didn't have a count of his whole troupe—and he looked very frightened, fearing that he had digested it alive". Roginsky, who, in 1921, at the Medrano circus, "feasted on two dozen whole hazelnuts with their shells" and "on command would bring out the number of hazelnuts requested". He would also swallow goldfish, then "return to daylight one or more of these little animals which remained perfectly alive" and " he crowned his exercises by absorbing, wrapped in small rubber bags, banknotes of varying value and returning them in the order in which they were demanded without ever making a mistake or frustrating those who had ventured to entrust them to him". Hadji Ali, known as "the Egyptian enigma", a music hall performer of Egyptian origin born around 1890, allegedly to a cannibal mother, who said he discovered his talent by chance one day while swimming in the Nile: having swallowed a fish, he returned it alive. He would swallow live fish, watches, lighted cigarettes and handkerchiefs, returning them in the order requested, then, spitting kerosene, set fire to a small miniature castle, which he would then extinguish with a long jet of water, also regurgitated.