Tempting Fate

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French-born acrobat Jean-François Gravelet made a name for himself by crossing the gorge below Niagara Falls on a tightrope. The rope was 1,100 feet long and 160 feet above the water, and he crossed it successfully on June 30, 1859.

Evidently this wasn’t hard enough, because he later repeated the feat with a series of hair-raising variations: blindfold, in a sack, pushing a wheelbarrow, wearing stilts. That man on his back is his manager, Harry Colcord, who apparently concluded it must be pretty safe. Midway through one crossing, Gravelet actually sat down and cooked an omelette.

He died quietly of diabetes at age 73.

Hunger Is the Best Sauce

During the siege of Paris, the city’s starving populace ate its horses, dogs, and cats, and eventually even turned to rats and zoo animals. In Paris in Its Splendor (1900), Eustace Reynolds-Ball gives the menu of a popular restaurant in the Latin Quarter at the beginning of January 1871, “which gives a good idea of the gastronomic straits to which the light-hearted Parisians were reduced”:

  • Consommé de Cheval au millet.
  • Brochettes de foie de Chien à la maître d’hôtel.
  • Emincé de rable de Chat. Sauce mayonnaise.
  • Epaules et filets de Chien braisés. Sauce aux tomates.
  • Civet de Chat aux Champignons.
  • Côtelettes de Chien aux petits pois.
  • Salmis de Rats. Sauce Robert.
  • Gigots de chien flanqués de ratons. Sauce poivrade.
  • Begonias au jus.
  • Plum-pudding au rhum et à la Moelle de Cheval.

See also Balloon Mail.

Capsule Summary

On May 17, 1817, Samuel Jessup died. That was bad news for his apothecary, who had been suing him over an unpaid bill — over the course of 21 years, Jessup had taken 226,934 pills, an average of 10,806 a year. Between 1812 and 1816 he took 78 pills a day, 51,590 in 1814 alone. With the addition of 40,000 bottles of mixture, juleps, and electuaries, the druggist’s bill filled 55 closely written columns.

Despite all this — or perhaps because of it — Jessup lived to age 65.

Animal Lover

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Paleontologist William Buckland (1784-1856) proposed to eat his way through the animal kingdom — he served panther, crocodile, and mouse to his dinner guests, and he claimed that the most unpleasant dishes he had tried were mole and bluebottle.

Raconteur Augustus Hare recalled that at Nuneham Buckland was presented with the heart of a French king in a silver casket: “Whilst looking at it he exclaimed, ‘I have eaten many strange things, but have never eaten the heart of a king,’ and before any one could hinder him he had gobbled it up, and the precious relic was lost for ever.”

Easy Money

In July 1891, an engineer named Charles Wells went to Monte Carlo with £4000, broke the bank 12 times in 11 hours, and came away with a million francs.

He returned in November and made another million.

The casino never discovered his system.

Fair Enough

A man of the name of Desjardins was tried on his own confession, for having admitted that he was an accomplice of Louvel, the assassin of the Duke de Berri. The case was clearly proved. Desjardins set up, as his defence, that he was so notorious for his falsehood, that nobody could give credit to a word he said, and produced a whole host of witnesses, his friends and relatives, who all swore to the fact with such effect, that he was declared Not Guilty.

Annual Register, 1822

An Inadvertent Effigy

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In 1813 Samuel Coleridge received the news of his own death. A gentleman in black had hanged himself from a tree in Hyde Park; authorities had found no money or papers in his pockets, but his shirt was marked “S. T. Coleridge.”

According to Charles Robert Leslie in Autobiographical Recollections, “Coleridge was at no loss to understand how this might have happened, since he seldom travelled without losing a shirt or two.”

The Crawfordsville Monster

The Indianapolis Journal of Sept. 5, 1891, reports that two icemen were hitching a wagon in Crawfordsville, Ind., at 2 a.m. on Sept. 4 when they saw in the sky “a horrible apparition approaching from the west.” A headless monster, 18 feet long and 8 feet wide, floated 300 feet overhead, apparently propelled by fins. It circled a nearby house, disappeared to the east, then returned, emitting a wheezing, moaning sound. The men fled, but the noise awakened a Methodist pastor, who saw the creature from his window.

Reportedly it returned on the following evening, when hundreds of witnesses saw a flapping “thing” that “squirmed in agony” and made a “wheezing, plaintive noise” as it hovered in the sky.

That’s all we know. The creature, if it really existed, never returned to Crawfordsville.