When Jeanne Calment was born, in 1875, the life expectancy for a French woman was 45. In 1991, Calment became the oldest person in the world. But two researchers don’t believe her story.
When Calment was ninety-four, in 1969, her notary bought her apartment. The purchase was made under the Frenchsystem, in which the buyer agrees to make regular payments on a property that the seller continues to live in. In such an arrangement, the buyer essentially wagers on how quickly the seller will die. The Calment apartment proved to be an epically terrible investment.
The longer Calment lived, the more famous she became. On Grandmother’s Day, a well-known television presenter offered her a kilo of chocolate. “I want a ton!” Calment replied. Several weeks later, two trucks showed up. Even the validators were dazzled by their subject. They recorded hours of conversations with her, excerpts of which they later published in a book, “
There were the van Gogh stories, in which she’d mixed up her husband and her father. In addition, Calment had told her validators that she had been escorted to school by a maid named Marthe Touchon. Census documents confirmed that a Marthe worked for the Calment family in the early nineteen-hundreds. She was listed as Marthe Fousson, a variation on the name that seemed reasonable, given that Calment had difficulty enunciating at the end of her life.
According to a 2010 paper, “Typologies of Extreme Longevity Myths,” sixty-five per cent of people who purport to be a hundred and ten are wrong or lying. For those who claim to be a hundred and fifteen, the rate of inaccuracy is ninety-eight per cent. Sometimes people don’t know their real ages. Other times, people exaggerate for reasons of prestige, financial gain, religious practice, family honor, or regional or national chauvinism.
The passage of time often quells controversy, but, in the Calment case, it only unsettled the dust. As the world’s population continued to grow, the cohort of people living to the age of a hundred and twenty-two did not. More than two decades after Calment’s death, her record still stood, making her a more conspicuous outlier with every year that went by. Either she had lived longer than any human being ever or she had executed an audacious fraud.
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