Jeanne Calment used to say that smiling was the key to long life. "I've only ever had one wrinkle and I'm sitting on it," was one of her favourite bons mots. When she died yesterday at the age of 122, she held the world's record for longevity.
"She was the living memory of our town," the mayor of Arles, Mr Michel Vauzelle, said. "She gave us comfort and hope with her vitality, her sense of humour, her tenderness. In short, we hoped she could be immortal."
Dozens of journalists from around the world flocked to Arles for Mrs Calment's annual birthday party. "She was thrilled to be famous," Ms Sylvie Aries , a journalist on the local newspaper, La Provence, who knew Mrs Calment well, told The Irish Times. "She had an impertinent side to her. She used to say: `I waited 115 years to be famous, so I'm going to enjoy it.' "
Mrs Calment's appraisal of the painter Vincent Van Gogh, whom she met when she was 13, is well known: "an awful character and ugly as sin".
Yet her triumph at living so long was tinged with sadness. "Sometimes I think that God has forgotten me," she said when she entered the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-living person in October 1995.
For the past 34 years she had no immediate relatives. Her husband, Fernand, died in 1942 after eating cherries sprayed with insecticide. Their daughter, Yvonne, died in 1934 and their only grandchild, a doctor, was killed in a car accident in 1963. She will be buried alongside them in the family vault in Arles.
The daughter of a shipowner, Jeanne Calment received a typical 19th century bourgeois education, including secondary schooling, painting and the piano, which she later taught. Her political opinions spanned a century of French and world history.
She was a passionate defender of Captain Dreyfus, the Jewish army officer whose conviction on trumped-up charges was a cause IT]celebre in 1898, and she was horrified all her life by the murder of the Tsar and his family. She outlived 17 French presidents, and treasured birthday telegrams from Gaullist politicians.
Mrs Calment lived in her own apartment until the age of 110, when she moved to a local old people's residence. She enjoyed a glass of port and a cigarette every evening before dinner, but doctors stopped the practice after she became blind and deaf four years ago.
"Jeanne Calment's longevity is due to genetic factors. Her ancestors generally lived incomparably longer than the average," said geriatric physician Dr Bernard Forette.
The Guiness Book of Records said other rivals for the longevity crown lacked documentation. They include a former Brazilian slave, Maria do Carmen Geronimo, who celebrated her alleged 125th birthday last March.
