Welcome to Running: A FEVER. This is a podcast about fitness, diet, and medicine. The goal is to live a long, healthy, happy, active life. To love my life enough to make it last as long as possible. I’m Michael Davis.
The world is fascinated with long life. Perhaps because we wonder what we would do, individually, if we had an abundance of time, the world’s most valuable resource, it’s fun to think about it. And so the world is fascinated by Jeanne Calment, the human with the longest documented lifespan, 122 years, 164 days. In Episode 170, I gave an overview of her life and some details about her healthy and unhealthy habits in a 30-minute show. Now I will provide a broader review of her life with more detail.
Nicolas Calment was a boat builder by trade, born in 1837, as was his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. His wife Marguerite gave birth first to a son, Francois, in 1865, and ten years later, at about 7 a.m. on Sunday, February 21, 1875, to a daughter named Jeanne Louise. Her godfather was a diplomat named Louis Pages, and her godmother was her aunt, Jeanne Gilles. The place was the city of Arles, in the Provence region in southern France, where Jeanne was to live the rest of her long life. She had two other siblings, Antoine and Marie, who both died young.
Though she didn’t see her godfather much, Jeanne’s godmother was nice and spoiled her with lots of sweets and cakes. She didn’t care much for pastry but loved ice cream, especially vanilla. She also liked ‘quatr-quarts’, which is similar to pound cake. Even into her 117th year, Jeanne had sweets at every meal. She never gained weight, though, throughout her life. She said she had “the stomach of an ostrich.” Sometimes she would have as much as two pounds of chocolate in a week. And she enjoyed a glass of port wine as well.
Jeanne’s father called her a tomboy, and her brother Francois was a “gentle one.” Francois was a sailor.
She began her education at a girls-only church school called Madame Benet’s boarding school at the age of seven. She had her first communion while she was attending. After first communion, she went on to what she called “college.” At school, she would go home at noon, picked up by her father or their maid, returning in the afternoon again, picked up by her father. He was very protective of her. She went to school until she was sixteen, passing her brevet, the exam needed to enter the lycée (high school), but she did not go on to high school. After age 16, she stayed with her parents as she said, “awaiting marriage.” She did a lot of painting during this time, making large paintings. Her brother, Francois, painted as well. She also painted a screen and made stained-glass windows with flowers.
When Jeanne was thirteen, Vincent Van Gogh came to Arles on February 20, 1888. It is possible that she met him. She said in some newspaper interviews that her husband had introduced her. She wasn’t married then but had already met her future husband. During this visit to Arles, Van Gogh cut his ear and was hospitalized there. Later in life, she appeared in a film about him, a French Canadian production called Vincent and Me.
Music was an ongoing part of Jeanne’s life, starting at seven and continuing with piano lessons. It was common for little girls of bourgeois education to take up the piano. She never forgot how to play and did so well into old age. Her first piano teacher was Cesari Gaston. As a young girl, Jeanne’s father forbade her from going to the opera, but she went often after getting married. She didn’t care for the operas in Arles, so they would go to Marseilles. The first opera she ever saw was Tannhauser. She didn’t have a favorite, but she liked Mozart, both at the opera and when she played piano. When they went to the opera, Jeanne would wear beautiful evening dresses and furs, one of which was a silver fox.
When Jeanne was ten, Nicolas Calment built his last ship and called it La Jeanne for his daughter. It was a large type of barge made of wood. The launch was a significant event in Arles. There was a party and the whole town came. The mayor was there, along with the sous-prefet, a representative of the French government. A priest was also there to bless the vessel. It was a Sunday. Jeanne wore a beautiful white dress with a big blue sash around the middle, tied in a bow at the back. Nicolas christened the boat with a bottle of champagne. As the barge was being launched, a band played La Marseillaise, the French national anthem. After he closed his shipbuilding business, he became a municipal advisor in Arles.
She remembers celebrations in Arles that included bullfights, but she did not like them. She thought they were savage. Her husband liked them, though. She once saw a famous toreador known as Espartero. She watched him die in a bullfight in Nimes. The bull tore off his coat, then jumped on top of him.
Jeanne had known Fernand Nicolas Calment her whole life. He lived in Avignon, and every year she went there on holiday. He would always visit her when he came to Arles. She recalls that he was good-looking and friendly, and had a pleasant, patient nature. Other girls were interested in him. She said, “My husband was a marvelous man. When one has an angel, one keeps him, and the rest don’t see you.” When she was fifteen, he tried to court her, but she was still a kid more interested in candy than boys. Jeanne’s strict father would not let her go to dances or anywhere else alone. On April 8, 1896, Jeanne and Fernand got married. So she didn’t change her last name. Her godmother gave her a headdress for her wedding, a wreath of white lilac. They moved into an apartment above their fabric shop, where she would live until she entered a nursing home at the age of 110.
As a married couple, they would play tennis, roller skate, cycle, swim, fence, and take excursions to the mountains. They liked taking long hikes. They even ice-skated on the nearby Rhone River. But mostly, they would hunt. Jeanne says she had a “masculine nature.” Fernand taught Jeanne to hunt, and they formed a group of hunters known as a stockholders’ society that would hunt together. They hunted rabbits. They had a hunting dog named Liberty, who lived in their apartment with them.
Fernand inherited his father’s successful fabric shop, Jacques Calment et Fils, which sold drapery, lingerie, silks, and more. They moved into the apartment above the shop, which had about ten employees. Jeanne never worked in the shop. In fact, she never had a job. Though it is common for centenarians to cite work as one of the keys to their long lives, Jeanne had no experience with it at all.
Jeanne and Fernand liked to go to Marseilles, where they ate at a restaurant called Phoceen. Jeanne, in particular, liked seafood, oysters, and mussels, or bouillabaisse, a traditional Provençal fish soup, with a glass of white wine.
After Jeanne got married, she would smoke one cigarette or a cigarillo after dinner. It was not unusual for married women to smoke, but young girls were not allowed to. She preferred Dunhill cigarettes and continued this practice until she was 117.
After Jeanne and Fernand married, Fernand, whose name means “brave traveler”, wanted to travel before they had children. In 1897, after they had been married for one year, their daughter Yvonne was born. The birth went well, assisted by a midwife named Madame Leliere. As Jeanne remembered, Yvonne took after her father and was sweet and easy to raise. At her first communion, she wore a white dress, and Jeanne wore a pink dress and a hat. She did well in school, Madam Benet’s private boarding school, and passed her brevet. Jeanne and Yvonne would play duets on the piano together.
Madame Calment was 25 years old when the turn of the 20th century happened. Her husband was 46 when World War I started and did not serve. They travelled a lot after the war. The worldwide economic crisis that started in 1929 did not affect the Calments. Their business continued to thrive. They seemed to be living a charmed life.
Yvonne married Colonel Joseph Billot, a career soldier, at Saint Trophime, dressed in white satin and a lilac stem headdress paid for by Madame Arel. In 1926, they had a son, Frederic Billot.
Then, in January of 1934, Yvonne, now 36, died of pleurisy, which is an inflammation of the membranes that surround the lungs and line the chest cavity. She was hospitalized at first, then returned home during Advent of 1933, where she died. This was a sorrowful memory for Jeanne and one she disliked talking about.
After Yvonne’s death, Jeanne raised her grandson Frederic as her own, though he lived in a nearby apartment with his father. She remembered him as good-natured and loved him very much. He called her “Manzane,” which is a contraction of “maman Jeanne.” Frederic went to medical school and became a doctor and an ear, nose, and throat specialist (ENT). He later opened a practice in their home.
In 1942, Fernand died of copper sulphate poisoning. They had been staying with friends in the country, where they both had eaten cherries treated with copper sulfate. Jeanne had not eaten as much as her husband and was able to survive, but Fernand died several months later. He was 74, she was 67.
In 1944, she finally got the right to vote. She was 69 years old.
Frederic died in a car accident in 1962. She would go to the cemetery, on foot or bicycle, to meditate at his grave. She continued this even after she moved into the Maison du Lac at the age of 110, though she then went by taxi.
Jeanne knew Nobel Prize winner Frederic Mistral, who won the 1904 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was a friend of her husband’s. Mistral lived and wrote about the region in which Jeanne Calment lived.
Did she celebrate when she reached 100 years old? “No,” she said, “that one wasn’t extraordinary. It was discreet. It wasn’t that unusual. I was doing well. My health has helped me a lot. It still does. My health was good, and I had a hell of a lot of willpower.”
On February 14, 1991, Jeanne Calment became the oldest person in the world when Carrie White died in Florida at the age of 116 years, 4 months. Jeanne was one week short of her 116th birthday. At that time, there were fewer than 4,000 people in the world over 100. Now there are over 700,000.
When she was 118, when asked if she would be happy to reach 120, she replied, “Well, of course! Because I will have the time to make the most of loads of things to come, loads of interesting things.”
Her 120th birthday party turned her nursing home, Maison du Lac, into a madhouse. The grounds were crammed with hundreds of journalists from TV stations worldwide with trucks and cables, bands, folk groups, and children dressed in Arlesian costumes. VIPs made speeches. The French Minister of Health made an appearance. She had a cake with 120 candles. A parade of postal workers brought in over 16,000 birthday cards from over 100 countries around the world.
Madame Calment was always religious. In her younger days, she always went to Mass; on Fridays, she went to vespers. She would also go to church on the first Friday of every month. And even near the end of her life, she always said a prayer in the morning. One prayer she said was, “My God, Lord, I need You more than ever to help me do certain things.” She said the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary in the morning and the evening. And she said that she did not want to die, but said, “If death comes, it won’t bother me.”
Jeanne Louise Calment died of an unknown cause in the early morning of Monday, the 4th of August, 1997. She was buried quietly the next day. She is to date the only dodecacentenarian ever to live.
“There’s no such thing as a terrible ordeal; you just have to find a solution each time.”
References:
Allard, M., Lebre, V., Robine, J.M. (1998) Jeanne Calment: From Van Gogh’s Time to Ours 122 Extraordinary Years (B. Coupland, Trans.). Thorndike Press. (Original work published 1994)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment
https://tinyurl.com/calment-van-gogh