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 died by 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,The editor of Les Derniers Contes de Charles-Philippe de Chennevières-Pointel, known as Jean de Falaise, humorously notes that "The town of Falaise has the glory of having produced a number of beings of monstrous configuration, either externally or internally. To mention only the best-known, these two who, at the time of the Empire, showed themselves as albinos in the Passage Delorme in Paris, and of the same period, was the famous Jacques de Falaise, who swallowed, with incomparable ease, rats, swords, vipers, flaming guts, and who, like all creators of a genre, has not been surpassed by any imitator; finally, and most recently, that marvellous child from Falaise, who ran all over the kingdom, and whose four limbs offered phenomenal extremities." () 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", yet he never "felt the need to satisfy his hunger with disgusting or bizarre objects".
The circumstances in which he became aware of his extraordinary abilities are the subject of divergent accounts. According to the 1820 Notice devoted to him by an anonymous author, it happened, on an unspecified date, that, as a game, he hid a bride's chain and locket in his mouth, then, in order not to be discovered, he swallowed them and declared: "Vous voyais ben que je n'lons point" ("You could see that I don't have anything").. 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".
Having discovered this curious talent, Jacques Simon repeated the experiment several times, swallowing "corks and hard-boiled eggs with their shells", "keys, crosses, rings", then "live animals, which passed through with the same ease". Due to lack of training, however, he nearly "strangled himself at the market, trying to swallow a live eel".
Then, a freak show
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".. He gave a show of "amusing magic and phantasmagoria" in a small "theater", then located in a cellar of the Hôtel des Fermes, rue de Grenelle-Saint-Honoré (now rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau)... 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". This new profession seemed to Jacques to be much preferable to the one he had been practicing, and he soon resolved not to return to the quarries of Montmartre, having "no other regret than to have so long disregarded the great views that Providence had for him". English traveler Stephen WestonBritish clergyman Stephen Weston had a devotion to Paris. He witnessed the events of the Revolution in 1791 and 1792, but fled the French capital in mid-August of the latter year, considering it a city where one could "be killed by mistake or for six pounds". After the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, he hurried back, and during the summer of 1829, when he was in his eighties, he could be seen there daily at the theater and other places of amusement. 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".
After "a few weeks of practice under the eyes of his new boss", Jacques Simon made his debut at the Théâtre Comte in June 1816, under the stage name of "Jacques de Falaise", to which was quickly added the sonorous epithet of "polyphage",The term polyphage is "derived from πολυς, numerous, and φαγω, I eat"; Pierre-François Percy and Charles Nicolas Laurent "express by this name the eaters by profession, those gluttons whom nothing can satiate, and who, not very delicate about the choice of dishes, always find them good enough if they are abundant enough to satisfy their voracity. () 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" and "with an air of bliss painted on his face",. 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", but also live animals, such as a sparrow, a white mouse, a frog, a crayfish, an eel or a snake, never vomiting what he ingested in this way.. He readily responded to audience challenges, agreeing to repeat his "experiments" for spectators who arrived late, 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 polyphagusThe term polyphage is "derived from πολυς, numerous, and φαγω, I eat"; Pierre-François Percy and Charles Nicolas Laurent "express by this name the eaters by profession, those gluttons whom nothing can satiate, and who, not very delicate about the choice of dishes, always find them good enough if they are abundant enough to satisfy their voracity. () 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", he dipped into the gullet "instead of the eleven or twelve inches [30 to 32.5 cm] that the Indians inserted", "thirteen to fourteen inches [35 to 38 cm] of a polished steel blade, weighing one pound, eighteen inches [49 cm] long, three lines thick [7 mm], and one inch [2.7 cm] wide". He also did not coat the sword with saliva, unlike the Indians who, "more experienced than him, were more afraid of hurting themselves" and operated "without preparation", "more lightly [than them], with less precaution, and without giving the same signs of suffering". The columnists, with a touch of cockiness, pointed out that his performance surpassed that of his predecessors. For the Mercure de France, "we had at home, in Montmartre, even better than the Indian jugglers without suspecting it", while the Journal de Paris argued that "the Indian jugglers left in time not to see their glory eclipsed by that of a good Norman". Étienne de Jouy, who referred to him as the "Grand-gousier", found him "no less astonishing". 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".
It seems that every aspect of Jacques's performance was of interest to the public. The jokers "spread the rumor that he had to swallow a cat to look for the mouse in his stomach, and that, if the cat took too long to come back, he had a dog ready to go get it and bring it back". The revealed that "after each solid he swallowed, Jacques rather hastily drank a small dose, always about the same, of a wine said to have been prepared. He seemed to make no effort to kill living animals in his mouth, and boasted that he could feel them stirring in his stomach". Describing Jacques as an "homophagus",According to the Encyclopédie, an omophage, or homophage, is someone who eats raw flesh. For Joseph Favre, the "most relentless" omophagous "are called polyphagous". () Jean-Baptiste Félix Descuret qualifies: "The anthropophagus would eat you a man; the omophagus, if need be, would swallow him whole, and the polyphagus, fully clothed ". () 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."