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."

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