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Health and Commitment: The Woman Who Lived To 122 Years
Feb 21, 1875, Jeanne Louis Calment was born in a little town in the mountain of Arles, France. That was the year when Tolstoy published his book, Anna Karenina. One year later, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Growing up, Jeanne was one of the neighborhood girls, except for one thing. At the age of 13, she met the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, who was hanging around the Arles for three years before he died. “He was a wild young man,” Jeanne recalled, “not the sort my parents wanted me to mix with.”
She lived in a rich family and never worried about work. In 1895, she married her remote cousin who owned an art store. It was six years after the completion of the Eiffel Tower. Since then, her life was spinning around between tennis, bicycle, piano, and opera. But it was not to say she had got an easy life. In 1934, her only daughter died of pneumonia. 1942, a piece of bad dessert killed her husband. He was 74. Jeanne raised her grandson by herself and made him a successful medical doctor. But at the age of 64, he was killed in a car accident in 1963.
None of these incidents affected Jeanne’s health or her sanity. In 1965, at the age of 90, Jeanne sold her apartment to a lawyer called Andre-Francois…
