“I had to wait 110 years to become famous… I intend to enjoy it as long as possible.” – Jeanne Calment
Happy New Year, everyone! Thanks so much for your patience while this podcast host enjoyed a trip to Japan, a 30th birthday, and a very necessary break. I’m super energized to be back, with a whole stack of library books to sift through, planning more episodes for 2019. This year, we’ll kick things off with a deeper exploration of my favorite weird French history headline in years: was Jeanne Calment, the world’s oldest documented human, a complete fraud? Get ready for conspiracy theories wrapped up in conspiracy theories!
P.S. While you’re at it, consider voting for The Land of Desire in Buzzfeed’s Podcast List of 2019!
Episode 45: “The Mysterious Life of Jeanne Calment”
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Transcript
Bienvenue and welcome back to The Land of Desire! Happy new year! Whether you’re a longtime listener or whether you’ve only discovered the show during the winter break, I’m so glad to have you here, ready for another year of weird, wacky, wonderful French history.
This past week, everybody on the Internet seems to have taken a moment to page through their digital photo albums. On Facebook, there’s a so-called “aging challenge” where you post your first profile picture and compare it to your most recent. On Instagram and Twitter, users are juxtaposing photos from 2009 to 2019. We’re all taking a moment to ruminate on the fleeting nature of time, the accumulation of experience and wisdom, and the importance of exercise and a good sunscreen. So it feels like the right time to explore my new favorite scandal of French history, because it’s a story of fraud, aging and an international conspiracy theory which asks: are you really the same person you were years ago? This week, let’s investigate the surprising controversy of Jeanne Calment, the oldest authenticated human in history. Was she a wisecracking, heavy smoking old lady who met Van Gogh and rode her bicycle until her 100th birthday? Or was she a grand fraud, forced to maintain a lie that took on repercussions she never expected? Why is her life suddenly grounds for a furious academic war, 22 years after she died? And what can a woman born before Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone tell us about the nature of the internet today?
“In the year 1875, on the 22nd of February at two o clock in the morning, in front of myself, Louis Ournaud, mayor of Arles, performing my duty as an officer of the state, with Nicolas Calment, ship’s carpenter, thirty seven years old, living in Arles, who told us that on the twenty first of February, at seven o clock in the morning, Marguerite Gilles, his wife, no profession, thirty seven years old, living on the rue Duroure, was delivered of a child of the feminine sex who has been introduced to us and to whom he gives the names of Jeanne Louise.”
With this very long, very convoluted, and very neatly written sentence, Jeanne Louise Calment comes into official existence. This single, boring, bureaucratic line will become one of the most important things ever to happen to Jeanne Calment, because it will take an otherwise ordinary life and render it extraordinary, improbable and wondrous. The birth certificate itself is a historical quirk: France was definitely ahead of the curve when it came to official birth certificates. Around the world, some babies born in 1875 had their name jotted down in a church record or a family bible when they were born, but most didn’t have any record of their birth at all. Birth records were a tricky business in the 19th century: women gave birth at home, often to babies who died right afterwards. Babies could be born stillborn, they could be born on the road, they could be born to illiterate families, they could be born enslaved. Jeanne Louise’s birth certificate is extraordinary in its own right, and testifies to what a lucky little infant she was: healthy, well-to-do, a valued new addition to society’s ranks. France began recording births in an official register following the French Revolution, and Napoleon, who seems to have lost track of his own birth certificate over the years, ensured the process was widespread and accurate. Why? Because birth certificates made census taking easier, and census taking made tax collections easier.
Speaking of census records, that’s the next time we hear from Jeanne Louise, who appears in the 1876 records at the age of one, along with her father, her mother, and her older brother. She shows up again in the census records of 1881 and 1886, and then begins showing up in school records: Asile nursery school, the Place de la République boarding school, and then eventually high school. In 1896, the city of Arles records a marriage between Fernand Nicolas Calment, aged 27 and his cousin, Jeanne Louise, aged 21, and two years later, the birth of their daughter, Yvonne, and so on. For the next hundred years, Jeanne Louise creates a paper trail of her life, unremarkable for France, but remarkable for the times. For comparison’s sake, the United States didn’t begin considering birth certificates until the great immigration waves of the early 20th century. Suddenly, it became important to know who was born in America and who wasn’t, a feeling which only intensified in World War II. When the Defense Department required that employees be American citizens, one third of the country couldn’t produce a birth certificate. Meanwhile, the city of Arles meticulously recorded every birth and death chronologically, in big books, with alphabetical order indexes and 10-year volumes summarizing the previous records.
Outside of the records office, Jeanne Calment was busy living her life. When she was 9 years old, Jeanne survived a cholera epidemic which devastated Arles. When she was 13, a rough looking painter came into her uncle’s shop to buy canvas. “I was very pretty,” she said, “but all he wanted to discuss was painting.” 100 years later, Jeanne would be asked to recall, over and over, this brief but memorable encounter with Vincent van Gogh. A few years later, Jeanne married her cousin, Fernand, who ran a prosperous drapery business – I think he inherited the shop that Vincent strolled into – and the newlyweds moved into the apartment above the shop. From this point on, Jeanne was a lady of leisure. With servants to take care of the household, Jeanne lived a pretty carefree, active life, taking up fencing, tennis, swimming, rollerskating, piano-playing, and most famously, cycling. Very little affected the calm waters of Jeanne’s life. World War I passed her by, since Fernand was 46 and too old to be drafted, though it did produce a soldier, Joseph, who would go on to marry Jeanne’s daughter, Yvonne. The pair moved into the apartment next door to Jeanne and Fernand and gave birth to Jeanne’s first grandson. A few years later, however, Jeanne sustained a blow when her daughter Yvonne died of pleurisy. From that moment on, her grandson walked down the hall to Jeanne’s apartment every day, where she raised little Frederic herself. World War II made little impact on her life. German soldiers slept in her spare rooms, but “they didn’t take anything away”. Halfway through the war, her beloved husband died of food poisoning after eating bad bowl of cherries. Shortly after the war, at the age of 70, Jeanne received the right to vote. By the 1950s, according to census records, Jeanne still lived in the same apartment, and her grandson Frederic still lived next door, though by this point his father, Jeanne’s son-in-law, had moved in with Jeanne to make room for young Frederic’s wife. By the 1960s, the calamities of growing old seemed to hit all at once: Jeanne’s brother, François, died at the age of 97, followed by Jeanne’s son-in-law, Yvonne’s husband, and then, only a few months later, her beloved grandson, Frederic died in a car crash. By 1965, at the age of 90, with no family left, Jeanne figured her life was coming to its quiet close. She entered into a reverse mortgage with a local lawyer, which formed a handy retirement income. The lawyer bought her apartment, but allowed her to live out the rest of her days there and paid her a monthly amount equivalent to 3,000 of today’s US dollars. The lawyer’s payments helped Jeanne continue to live independently, and live she did. Now, for the first time, Jeanne’s life slipped away from the banal business of everyday life and into something remarkable.
To the lawyer’s dismay, Jeanne…kept on living, on and on and on. “Excuse me if I’m still alive,” she wrote one year, “but my parents didn’t raise shoddy goods!” Year after year, the lawyer waited to move into the apartment he’d purchased, but Jeanne kept living, smoking cigarettes, drinking port, and riding her bicycle until in 1995, Jeanne outlived the lawyer himself. By that time, he’d paid her twice as much money in monthly installments as the apartment was worth, and his family took over the payments. Jeanne shrugged her shoulders, “In life, one sometimes makes bad deals.” At the age of 110, after 89 years living above the shop, Jeanne finally moved out of her apartment and into a nursing home. A few months later, Jeanne became the oldest living person in France.
In 1988, when a certain podcast host was acquiring her own birth certificate, Jeanne Calment attracted fame for the first time. It was the 100th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s famous visit to Arles, during which time he developed his trademark style of painting, moved in with Paul Gauguin and had their famous feud, suffered a mental breakdown, cut off his left ear – and painted 200 works, including Bedroom in Arles, The Night Cafe, and Van Gogh’s Chair. As Arles prepared to celebrate their most famous visitor, someone figured out that, incredible as it sounded, there was someone in Arles right then, still alive, who met the man. Suddenly, after more than a century of quiet living, Jeanne Calment became a celebrity. Over and over, she recounted her brief encounter with van Gogh: “People called him ‘fada’ – touched by the faeries” she remembered. “Very ugly, ungracious, impolite and not well. One day, my future husband wanted to introduce him to me. He glanced at me unpleasantly, as it to say ‘not worth bothering with,’ That was enough for me.” Jeanne’s story travelled around the world, and in 1990, Jeanne became the oldest person ever to appear in a motion picture when she appeared briefly in the documentary Vincent and Me at the age of 114.
After so many years of solitude, Jeanne welcomed her new fame. “I had to wait 110 years to become famous,” she said. “I intend to enjoy it as long as possible.” And enjoy it she did: she continued her daily cigarette and glass of port, and spent her time charming reporters and cracking jokes. She was remarkably active for her age – at a time when most supercentenarians were long confined to wheelchairs, Jeanne broke her hip when she was walking upstairs to bum a cigarette off one of her nurses. After miraculously surviving a hip operation, her doctor warned that she would probably never walk again. “I’ll wait,” Jean said. “I’ve got plenty of time.” As always, Jeanne carried on. At the age of 117, she was diagnosed with dementia. But when doctors took a closer look, they realised she was simply going blind and deaf – her mind was perfectly sound. When she turned 119, one of her doctors brought Jeanne a letter written in French from another centenarian in America. “I am not alone, after all!” But she was, in her own way: no other human being with a verifiable age had ever turned 116. Or 117. Or 118. Or 119. That year, officials from the French government, aging institutes, and medical schools descended on Arles to conduct a verification of her age. The process took over a year, spent sifting through the city records – now housed in the basement of the former psychiatric hospital which once cared for Vincent van Gogh himself. Compared to other supercentenarians, Jeanne’s story was easy enough: there was the sentence in the official registry confirming her birth, along with a baptismal record a few days later, and all the census records, marriage certificates, and more. Her age wasn’t simply verified, Jeanne became the MOST verified supercentenarian in history: unlike other contenders, she had lived a public life, a civic life, accumulating paperwork to match her years. The historians mapped Jeanne’s family tree going back five generations to see whether other Calments were prone to long lives – and as it turned out, they were, with even the men living just shy of their 100th birthday. As the officials paged through the documents, Jeanne finally gave up her beloved cigarettes at the age of 120. Lest you think this was part of some slowdown or a health kick, Jeanne declared, “God has forgotten about me. He can’t be in any hurry to see me. He knows me all too well.” She spent her 121st year releasing a CD and eating two pounds of chocolate a week, as would we all. By this point, her reporters were familiar faces. On his way out the door, an interviewer wished Jeanne well, “Until next year, perhaps.” She shot back, “I don’t see why not. You don’t look so bad to me.” By the age of 122, Jeanne was completely deaf, still drinking port, and still receiving checks from the lawyer’s family. “I don’t lack for anything,” she said. “I have everything I need. I’ve had a good life. I live in my dreams, in my memories, beautiful memories.” When asked for the secret of a long life, she shrugged and said, “Always keep your sense of humor. That’s what I attribute my long life to. I think I’ll die laughing. That’s part of my program.” Finally, at the age of 122 years, 164 days, Jeanne Calment finally died. France mourned the loss of their beloved “doyenne de l’humanité” and the story, it seemed, was at an end. Jeanne Calment’s story passed into legend, and while I still get an occasional shiver down my spine knowing that I shared the first decade of my life with someone who met Vincent van Gogh, the world moved on.
Until last month.
The conspiracy theory
A few weeks ago, during the slow period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, when everyone is bored of their family and hungry for any easy amusement, a bizarre story exploded into a flurry of international attention. Jeanne Calment…was a fraud! So said Nikolay Zak, a Russian academic, in a paper uploaded to a social networking site for researchers. According to Zak, the story of Jeanne Calment was no miracle of science or God, no extraordinary outlier, but a simple Agatha Christie puzzle, which a handful of Russian academics had solved. What’s the big reveal? Jeanne Calment, Zak claims, was actually Yvonne Calment, her daughter, the whole time.
Here’s the Cliff’s Notes of the claim: Yvonne Calment didn’t die of pleurisy in 1934, her mother, Jeanne did. Jeanne really was born in 1875, maybe she really did meet Vincent van Gogh, who knows, but she died at the reasonable age of 59. A struggling France, still reeling from World War One and nervously preparing for a potential World War Two, was desperate for any money it could scrounge from its citizens. Inheritance taxes were astronomical, and Jeanne’s estate – including the family store and the apartment upstairs – would be swallowed up by the tax man, possibly casting Yvonne, her husband and their child into the streets. Instead, Yvonne pretended SHE was the one who died, and assumed her mother’s identity. Once the lie took hold, she couldn’t escape without facing serious penalties, so she had to maintain the fiction, especially in later years when she depended on her income from the lawyer and his family to maintain her independence. By the time she began attracting attention for her age, what was there to do but smile and go along for the ride? According to this theory, the woman who died in 1997 was 99 years old – quite old, but nothing extraordinary, especially in a long-living family like the Calments. It was all a lie, and a lie which the French were happy to maintain, as long as the story of Jeanne Calment helped reassure them that the French way of life was superior. Everyone believed her story because they wanted to believe her story: the doctors and researchers believed her story because it brought them world renown to work closely with the world’s oldest human. The French government looked the other way because they wanted to lay claim to the world’s healthiest society. The French public didn’t ask questions as long as Jeanne kept reassuring everyone they could eat their chocolate and smoke their cigarettes and drink their port and live forever.
So what evidence did they have to support this heavy accusation?
- Living to the age of 122 is incredibly unlikely – not only did Jeanne outlive everyone else, she did so by a country mile. In the world of supercentenarians, the records creep forward by days, maybe months, with one human outliving the next by a matter of hours. But Jeanne is the Secretariat of humans. No other human has ever, so long as we can verify been 122 years old, or 121 years old, or 120 years old.
- Her interviews have inconsistencies – in one story she says she learned to hunt when she was 40 and her daughter Yvonne was 16. In another story she says she learned to hunt when she was around 20. She mixes up her relationships with others, referring to her mother as her grandmother, and referring to her father’s shop when it would have been either her uncle’s shop or – Zak basically clears his throat for effect here – Yvonne’s husband’s shop.
- She was extraordinarily mobile for her age, much more so than any other person we’ve known to reach the age of 110. Almost no one past the age of 110 can stand upright on their own two feet, let alone climb upstairs to bum a cigarette.
But here’s what else is included in this paper: citations for the Daily Mail newspaper, which has the integrity of a neglected Wikipedia article and the academic standing of a pamphlet handed to you at the mall. One piece of evidence cited in all seriousness is a Facebook poll, asking strangers whether they thought the really old woman in the photo looked like the young woman in the old photo. My favorite piece of so-called evidence is that Jeanne had an unusually strong relationship with her son-in-law, who moved in which her after Yvonne’s death and never left. Surely that meant that he was secretly moving in with his wife! Or, here’s a thought, he moved in with the frail woman entering her 70s who would be raising his son. One suspicious fact is that Jeanne burned most of her family photos before moving into the nursing home. Destroying the evidence! Or, alternately, a 114 year old woman with no heirs or descendants was moving out of the apartment she’d lived in for ninety eight years and wanted to let go of the past. Zay has all kinds of arguments based on photo analysis, aging old photos up and aging down recent photos, and I won’t dignify those lines of reasoning with more time. Here’s a sentence: “the elderly Madame Calment, the young Yvonne Calment and her father Fernand had foreheads that go vertically upwards and do not look low, while on the photo of young Jeanne, [presumably before she swapped places with her daughter] the forehead goes at an angle and may be considered low.” Well, with evidence like that!
Here’s the thing: I could agree that there are some intriguing arguments here and there. But reading through the paper, I cannot emphasize enough that this guy is an amateur. This isn’t a peer-reviewed paper published in a scholarly journal, it’s a blog post that an undergraduate professor would reject in a heartbeat. You can read it for yourself, the paper is easy to find, and anyone who’s ever read an academic paper in their life will scratch their head. Who is Nicolay Zak, anyway? What a good question, and one that we’ll come back to in a minute. Funny thing is, nobody else seems to have asked that question.
Rather, the world press, sleepy on eggnog and desperate for a headline, ate up the story at once. Every major newspaper in France screamed the story, and everyone else followed suit, with major news outlets in at least 14 countries reporting on the story. Every major newspaper I checked in the United States has published a story about this conspiracy theory. And every story, except for the Washington Post, repeats the same arguments from the same paper, without ever asking who wrote the paper, where it came from, and whether anyone else thinks it has any actual merit. And now, dear listeners, the story takes another twist. What if the conspiracy theory…is actually part of a conspiracy theory? Buckle up, y’all, we’re taking a wild ride into the world of Russian gerentology.
Nikolay Zak is a glass blower. He has a degree, not in aging, but in mathematics. He studies gerentology as a hobby, since life is a rich tapestry and the Internet has online forums for every one of us. He belongs to a naturalist group at Moscow State University, but this isn’t an official sponsored organization, it’s essentially a student group. It was at this group that Zak met Valery Novoselov, who is an actual academic geriatrician. Novoselov convinced Zak to put his theory on paper, and acted as a mentor for him. The thing is, Novoselov also comes off as…well, a crackpot. The kind of crackpot who emails other academics who verified Jeanne Calment’s life to tell them that he’s reporting them to the FBI, and the Russian equivalent as well. The kind of guy who set up the Facebook polls asking laypeople to look at doctored photos and estimate how old very old ladies are, and then tells his protogée that this is not an embarrassing thing to put in a serious paper. And then, once you get past the glass blower and the crank, you get…the shadowy people.
The shadowy people who edit Jeanne Calment’s Wikipedia page, a bunch of Wikipedia pages about Russian politics and Russian technology and nothing else. The shadowy people who keep signing up for gerentology websites by the hundreds, posting their claim that Jeanne Calment was a fraud, and then never commenting ever again. The shadowy people who have an agenda, one with a bigger scope than setting the record straight about one old woman.
The average life expectancy of a man in the United States is 76 years. In Russia, it’s 62. And that’s a jaw-dropping improvement. 1 out of every 4 Russian men die before the age of 55, mostly because of crippling alcoholism. In other words, life expectancy in Russia today is worse than it was in 1959, and is comparable to life expectancy rates in Bangladesh or Yemen, for Russian men it’s more like Sudan, Rwanda or Botswana. What accounts for the astonishing difference between Russian and American life expectancies in the 21st century? There are two factors: extraordinary rates of cardiovascular disease, and violence and injuries.
Needless to say, life expectancy rates are a source of national shame in Russia. It’s little surprise that Russia has sought to promote its own, homegrown Jeanne Calments wherever they can be found. Abkhazia, an isolated region on the coast of the Black Sea, is particularly famous for its long-lived population. It’s easy to find thousands of blog posts extolling the lifestyles of the Abkhasians, telling us all to eat and work and live like they do in order to live forever – except none of this matters, because the Abkhasians don’t, in fact, live any longer than anyone else. All those outrageous claims of mountain people living to be 150 years old were, obviously, just claims, bolstered by the fact that there was absolutely no kind of documentation available to an isolated group of people in mid 19th century Russia. As one paper puts it, “In our experience, claims to age 130 exist only where records do not.” A famous paper released in 1984 looked at the work of the Soviet Union’s own scientists, who found that, of all the Abkhasians they interviewed, 60% of them were younger than claimed and not a one of them were over the age of 110. The paper says, “gerontologists must now look elsewhere to find ‘the secret of longevity’.” “The secret of longevity” – that sounds familiar. Oh, right – Nikolay Zak’s paper on Jeanne Calment is called, sarcastically, “The secret of aging.” In his paper, Zak references the story of the Abkhazians as a cautionary tale about the unreliability of census data: “The fact that censuses can’t serve as a reliable source of information was well established by Soviet gerontologists who were trying to validate long-lived people from Azerbaijan. The phenomenon of Caucasian longevity was a subject of lots of papers and books, but it was based on a shaky foundation.” But here’s the thing: the story of the Abkhazians doesn’t tell us that census data is unreliable. It tells us that, specifically, Russian census data is unreliable. It’s not hard to read Zak’s sentences in a sarcastic tone: “Since you told us that our census data wasn’t reliable, why are you relying on it for your age verifications?”
To put it simply, when it comes to gerontology research, Russia isn’t particularly trustworthy. One leading gerontologist wrote, “The Russians are perhaps some of the most well-known subgroups of the population to provide misleading information on longevity.” Considering the USSR put Mahud Eyvazov on a stamp for his 148th birthday, sure, that makes sense. As one paper from 2010 summarized things, “exceptionally high proportions of centenarians are reported” in Russia but “the long history of longevity claims goes hand in hand with a long history of age overstatement.” The International Database on Longevity, which maintains the recognized list of the world’s extremely old persons, accepts data from 15 countries, and Russia isn’t one of them. The IDL arose out of a series of workshops in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when demographers and gerontologists came together to come up with standard criteria to validate or invalidate extreme claims of age, probably so they could all stop wasting their time climbing the tallest mountain in Brazil to meet the man everyone says is 300 years old, or whatever. One could say Russia has a history of hearing only the science it wants to hear – and there’s no better example than the studies work of Zhores Medvedev.
The paper I just mentioned which famously debunked Abkhazian aging claims was based on the 1974 work of Zhores Medvedev. After a long and internationally respected career studying farming, Medvedev published an expose of fraudulent science in official Soviet agricultural programs. In return, he was fired, and locked up in a psychiatric ward until he was able to pick the lock. Shortly thereafter, he was forced back into a psychiatric hospital until international outcry secured his release. By the 1970s, he’d been forced to switch to the field of gerontology. As my boyfriend put it, someone said, “Stick him in a field where we aren’t lying!” – except, oops, guess what? Medvedev had spent the decade after his institutionalization becoming one of the world’s foremost experts on age verification processes. He made his way up to Abkhazia and, once again, encountered massive fraud. In 1973, the USSR claimed that Shirali Mislimov had just died at the age of 168 years old. Never heard of the guy? For some reason, he wasn’t allowed to speak or meet with the press. Little surprise that the next year, having secured a visa to Great Britain, Medvedev gave someone in the USSR’s publicity department an angry eye twitch when he published his findings. Nowadays, Russian gerontologists don’t even go that far anymore. 21st century Russian scientists publish fewer papers in peer-reviewed journals than Brazil, or China or India. All of which brings me back to Nikolay Zak, and his glorified Livejournal entry.
Nikolay Zak, being a glassblower and not a gerontologist, researched his entire paper from home, relying on records he found online. He submitted his paper to peer-reviewed journals in Russia, all of which promptly rejected him, as did a number of other professional platforms. So Nikolay Zak uploaded his paper onto ResearchGate. ResearchGate is a networking site for academics, where they can upload the articles they’ve published elsewhere – I can’t emphasize that elsewhere part enough – and meet other interested parties to talk about their work. Instead Zak just uploaded his own PDF straight from Microsoft Word onto the Internet, and the world’s discerning media elite went wild. Just about any scientist you ask will tear out their own hair at the thought of so much attention being paid to claims which have been verified and reviewed by exactly no one. So why is this getting so much attention? Why is this paper such a big deal?
So we come back to the shadow people. Remember that the International Database on Longevity doesn’t accept data from Russia. One founder of the database, Jean-Marie Robine, says “Russia is not meeting the data quality we need for such a database.” Wait, Jean-Marie Robine? I feel like that name has come up before in my research – oh, wait, that’s right – he’s the the French demographer who validated Jeanne Calment’s age! So the famous researcher who verified Jeanne Calment’s age is also the man who acts as gatekeeper against Russian claims of ultra-aging, at a time when Russia is acutely embarrassed about its own public health crisis. Nikolay Zak points out, and he’s not exactly wrong, that the French are extremely wrapped up in the idea that their way of life produced the world’s oldest human: that by indulging in such classic French lifestyle choices like port, chocolate, cigarettes and cycling, we could all live forever. It stands to reason that Russia would be just as wrapped up in the idea that their way of life does NOT necessarily produce death by 40, that there are supercentenarians living among them and that it’s a grand Western conspiracy to shut them out of proving so. On the one hand, I can understand why the world’s foremost institutes only accept age verification data from countries with a record of accurate documentation. On the other hand, if you only accept data from 15 countries, how can you possibly state definitively who the world’s oldest person is? Which of these conspiracies is real? The one which says Russia is conducting a shadow campaign to discredit Western scientists? Or the one which says elitist, compromised French researchers were duped?
All of which brings us back, at last, to Jeanne Calment herself. Even after the appearance of Nikolay Zak’s paper, most scientists will give you the equivalent of an eye roll and a hand wave. The fact is, for Jeanne Calment to have been a conspiracy would require the coordination of an entire city, for decades, in a country which can’t even agree on the ingredients of a basic cassoulet. Nikolay Zak argues for an Occam’s razor approach: in the face of everything science tells us about the limits of human longevity, and the health of the very old, the simplest solution is that Jeanne Calment was not as old as she said she was. Jean-Marie Robine also argues for an Occam’s razor approach: in the face of all the research conducted, all the documentation which is still available in the public record today, the longevity of her family, all the supporting testimony from the people of Arles, and the lack of proof otherwise, the simplest solution is that Jeanne Calment was just as old as she said she was. Perhaps the only way to know for sure would be to exhume the body of Yvonne Calment, to see whether the skeleton matches that of a 36 year old woman, as expected, or whether it matches that of a 59 year old woman, which would indicate that the woman born in 1875, who lived in Arles at the same time as Vincent van Gogh, had been buried a long, long time ago. Unless we’re willing to go that far – and I’m personally not willing to dig up a body that’s been in the ground for 22 years on the word of a Russian hobbyist with an internet connection and possibly a grudge – we’ll have to live with the mystery. The story of Jeanne Calment, then and now, is really about one thing: the dream of living forever, with our mind and our body mostly intact. Whether we’re Soviet functionaries putting old men on stamps for their 148th birthday, or French researchers meeting the woman who will make them famous, or Russians taking pride in their way of life, or French people taking pride in their way of life, or American journalists with a cynical glint in their eye and a 24 hour news cycle, the story always ends the same way: we believe what we want to believe. I’ll end with this quotation from Jeanne Calment’s old neighbor:
“Is life completely visible to us, or isn’t it rather that this side of death we see one hemisphere only?…Death is not perhaps the hardest thing there is. If we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtedly true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive we cannot get to a star, any more than when we are dead we can take the train.
So it doesn’t seem impossible to me that cholera, pleurisy & cancer are the means of celestial locomotion, just as steam-boats, omnibuses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot.” – Vincent van Gogh
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire! I’m so excited to begin a brand new year of podcasting with all of you. Thanks to everyone who wrote in over the past month, whether you were giving me topic suggestions, sending me photos from your own trip to France, or just wishing me safe travels during my visit to Japan. I have a whole stack of research books out from the library and I hope you all enjoy the episodes to come! In the meantime, if you’re new to the show, check us out on Facebook and Twitter at The Land of Desire, and help support the show by visiting our Patreon, at patreon.com/thelandofdesire Or, head over to Buzzfeed, which is collecting its annual Buzzfeed Podcast List! You can just google Buzzfeed Podcast List to find it, but I’ll also share the list on Facebook and Twitter. Whether you’re a new listener or a longtime friend of the podcast, I’m so glad to have you here. Until next time, au revoir!
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Y’all, this new WordPress situation is a MESS. I will try to clean these show notes up soon.
Further Reading:
Jeanne Calment: From Van Gogh’s Time to Ours: 122 Extraordinary Years – Jeanne’s memoirs, put together with the help of her doctors and age verifiers. You can tell it was put together by a bunch of academics because two colons in the title? Yeesh.
Vincent and Me – Jeanne’s cinematic debut (and finale) at the age of 114.
Sources:
Edit: Y’all, this is my first time updating since the new WordPress came out and I am driving the STRUGGLE BUS. In the interest of publishing this episode before 2020 rolls around, I have to be lazy with my sources and just copy paste the URLs. I’m sorry, I’ll try to sort this new system out by the next episode!
Jeanne’s history:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226813486_Jeanne_Calment_and_her_successors_Biographical_notes_on_the_longest_living_humans
https://www.economist.com/obituary/1997/08/14/jeanne-calment
Click to access robine.allard.2003.pdf
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/02/21/the-worlds-firstborn/df1f6995-85fd-49df-baaf-4b74518a03b4/?utm_term=.df53946ba54d
http://articles.latimes.com/1997/aug/05/news/mn-19639
The conspiracy:
The Secret of Longevity – Here’s the (in)famous paper from Nikolay Zak! Read it for yourself.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/01/12/how-madame-calment-worlds-oldest-person-became-fuel-russian-conspiracy-theory/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7073534ad4bf
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/obituaries/2018/11/19/zhores-medvedev-who-exposed-soviet-science-fraud-dies/n5F8R5s1EiiwdYSD8zuLXL/story.html
https://academic.oup.com/gerontologist/article-abstract/24/1/95/637911?redirectedFrom=PDF
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062986/
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227230086_The_International_Database_on_Longevity_Structure_and_contents
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0032472031000145436
Click to access -eberstadtthedyingbear_194331985869.pdf
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/study-questions-age-worlds-oldest-woman-180971153/
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/9/18174435/oldest-person-alive-woman-age-jeanne-calment-controversy-longevity-mortality-statistics
Etc:
The history of American birth certificates (or lack thereof).