James Paris du Plessis (c. 1666 in Pithiviers, France – c. 1735 in London) was a servant of the famous 17th-century English diarist Samuel Pepys and the author of “A Short History of Human Prodigies, and Monstrous Births: of Dwarfs, Sleepers, Giants, Strong Men, Hermaphrodites, Numerous Births, and Extreme Old Age, &c.”, an unpublished manuscript he produced between 1730 and 1733 that is preserved in the British Library in London.^[1]

Du Plessis' bizarre 320-page manuscript is illustrated with hand-coloured drawings by the author himself. These include "John Grimes, a Dwarf", "Two Sisters conjoined", "A Woman Seven foot High",^[2] "A Woman with a Hog's Face",^[3] "A Spotted Negro Prince" and "The Monstrous Tartar". The section headed "A Wild Girl found Near Chalons in Champagne" contains the earliest-known report in English of Marie-Angélique Memmie Le Blanc, the famous feral child of 18th-century France.^[4] Shortly before his death, Du Plessis offered the manuscript and its illustrations to Sir Hans Sloane and they became part of Sloane's foundation collection of the British Museum.^[5][6]

According to the novelist Charles Dickens, Du Plessis' fascination with human strangeness and prodigies of all kinds began in his youth when he dug up the body of a stillborn two-headed child, a cousin, in the garden of his family home at Pithiviers in north-central France.^[7][8]