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The Lady and the Age: She Lived Longer Than Anyone in Living Memory
The world's oldest person, Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, died on August 4, 1997, at the age of 122.
Calment, who had lived in a retirement home for the past 12 years, was born on February 21, 1875 to a well-off Aries family of shop owners.
Calment's life spanned 17 French presidents, the execution of Tsar Nicholas II, the birth and death of the Soviet Union and two world wars. She was born in the year Bizet's "Carmen" was first staged and Tolstoy published 'Anna Karenina," a year before Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
According to the "Guinness Book of Records," no woman reached 122 before. It says the only man to live as long was Chigechiyo Izumi of Japan, who died in 1986 at the age of 120 years and 237 days.
Van Gogh Still Had His Ear
At the age of 14, she met Vincent van Gogh. She recalls him as "ugly as sin ... bad tempered, a grumbler and smelling of alcohol," although at that point the artist was still "with his ear."
At 20, she saw the first film, "The Sprinkled Sprinkler"1 by Louis Lumiere, which was shown along with the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II.
She remembers traveling to Paris when the Eiffel Tower was still under construction and was 70 when French women were first allowed to vote. But her favorite memory is her first helicopter ride, in 1939. "I thought I was a little bird in the clouds. It was a magnificent feeling."
Calment gave up smoking only five years before her death and was still riding a bicycle at 100. "All my life I've put olive oil on my skin and then just a puff of powder. I could never wear mascara, I cried too often when I laughed," she said.
The so-called "Doyenne (зд. старейшина) of Humanity," who heard best if spoken to loudly in the right ear in a thickAries accent, was legendary for her aphorisms and jokes like this one: "I've only ever had one wrinkle, and I'm sitting on it."
Extraordinary Case
"She was an exceptional case," said Jean-Marc Robine, a longevity expert(gerontologist) with the National Institute of Medical Research. "By chance, she was endowed with (had) an extraordinary genetic makeup."
He said research into her ancestors determined that unusually high proportion of them lived far longer than the norm for their eras, including many in the 17th and 18th centuries who lived into their 70s. Her father died at 94 and her mother at 86.
Robine remarked on her "extraordinary resistance to sickness, stress and depression." "There's nothing exceptional about her lifestyle," he said. "She was not athletic, not a health fanatic – simply interested in everything but not really passionate about anything."
At 21, Jeanne married her cousin, Fernand Calment. The couple had an only daughter, Yvonne, born in 1898, who gave them their only grandson. After she was widowed, Calment lived alone in her apartment in central Aries until the age of 110.
Calment celebrated her birthday every year in the presence of international journalists, but last January, Calment was placed under the guardianship of a local association after being judged incapable of looking after own affairs(недееспособна) and died of "natural causes."
Aries mayor Michel Vauzelle said that the whole town was in mourning for her. "She was the living memory of our town. She gave us comfort and hope with her vitality, her sense of humour, her tenderness. In short, we hoped she could be immortal."
Tiny in physical stature, Calment was a grandmother by 1926, but soon found herself alone after her grandson was killed in a road accident in 1960 at the age of 36.
Rotten Deal
One person had no reason to celebrate her longevity. He was lawyer Andre-Francois Raffray, who bought Calment's Aries apartment under an annuity arrangement when she was 90. Raffray never took possession of her property as he had planned, dying in 1995 aged a mere 77. "In life, people sometimes make rotten deals," she said at the time.
Doctors were constantly amazed by her longevity. "At 122 Madame Calment's heart, lungs, digestion and kidneys were all doing fine," said the physician Denis Mery. "Her intellectual faculties also remained astonishing for a woman of her age," he added.
But Calment had been decreasingly active, and celebrated her 122-nd birthday very quietly on doctors' orders because of her increasing frailty.
In 1996, however, she made a funk-rap, techno and dance compact disc shortly before her 121st birthday. Entitled Maitresse du temps (Mistress of Time), the funk-rap disc featured the former piano teacher singing four tracks, including one in English.
"I sleep like a baby," she told the daily Le Figaro shortly before she passed away, adding: "One hundred and twenty-two years old. Who could ask for more?"
Комментарии annuity arrangement – право пожизненного проживания;
frailty = poor health.
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