Calment sometimes said that her father waited on him. “We called him le dingo.” According to one anecdote, van Gogh came into her family’s drygoods store, on Rue Gambetta, wanting to buy canvas. Later in life, Calment claimed to have known Vincent van Gogh, telling different versions of an encounter with him in 1888. Approximately one billion five hundred million people walked the planet, and Calment would outlive them all. The life expectancy for a French woman was forty-five. Plastic, tea bags, public trash cans, and the zipper had yet to come into the world.
That February morning, in 1875, lavender smoke commingled with the cold in the tight streets of La Roquette, a traditional neighborhood of fishermen and the maritime trades. She was born at home on the Rue du Roure, in Arles, one of only four addresses she ever held. For a hundred and twenty-two years, five months, and fourteen days, Calment managed not to die. Jeanne Calment, however, was an accidental icon, her celebrity the result of a form of passivity. The first became a household name by marrying into royalty the second, by caring for the world’s sick and poor. People in France remember the summer of 1997 for the deaths of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and Jeanne Calment. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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