Some researchers have expressed skepticism about the famous super centenarian's records.
Since her death in 1997 at the age of 122, her claim to a longevity record has come under attack.
The French miss the deaths of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa and Jeanne Carman in the summer of 1997. The first became household name for its marriage to the royal family; Second, take care of the sick and the poor in the world. However, Jeanne Calment was an accidental icon and her fame was a passive result. In one hundred and twenty-two years, five months and fourteen days, Carmen managed to survive.
She was born in a home on Arlelu Street, one of her only four addresses. On that morning in February 1875, on the narrow streets of La Roquette, the smog of lavender mingled with the cold. La Roquette is a traditional community of fishermen and maritime traders. Plastic, tea bags, public trash cans and zippers have yet to appear. Life expectancy for women in France is 45 years. About 1.5 billion people walk on Earth, and Armands live longer than all of them.
Later in life, Calmont claimed to have known Vincent van Gogh and recounted different versions of his encounter with him in 1888. "Van Gogh is very ugly. Ugly like a lice," she recalled at one point. "We call him a wild dog." An anecdote says that Van Gogh came to her home's textile shop on Rue Gambetta to buy canvases. Calman sometimes said that her father had served him. However, her father was a shipbuilder; The store actually belonged to her husband's family. On another occasion, Calmont recalled, "My husband said to him, 'I introduce you to my wife.' The memory also became blurred: In 1888, When Armand was a teenager, he did not marry for the next eight years.
She had known her husband, Fernando Carman, since childhood. Their grandfathers were siblings and their grandmothers were sisters, making Jenny and Fernando two cousins. They had a daughter in 1898, Yvonne. Jenny never works but lives a busy recreational life, including playing tennis, rollerblading and stalking wild boars. The Carmente family lived in a luxury apartment upstairs in the family shop. Jenny occasionally appeared, showing an imperious look. "Mrs. Kalman wanted to impose her taste on me," one woman later recalled when she was a girl on an errand to buy fabrics. I stubbornly insisted on my choice and answered in a tone that didn't make her happy. I remember those two slaps. ”
In 1934, Yvonne died of complications from tuberculosis, leaving behind her husband, Colonel Joseph Billot, and a seven-year-old son, Freddy. Jenny and Fernando took care of the child as if they were their own. In 1942, some friends of the Calmontes invited them to their country house. During this time, Fernando devoured cherries, and Jenny ate one or two. The cherry was contaminated with chemicals, and within a few months, Jenny was widowed. Two years later, women were granted the right to vote in France. The Eiffel Tower was just over fifty. Armand is 67 years old, and she has nearly half of her life left.
After The death of Calmont's husband, she shared an apartment with her son-in-law, Joseph. Freddie, an otolaryngologist, and his wife live nearby. In 1963, Armand lost her last close friend. In January of that year, Joseph died of a long illness. In August, Freddie died in a car accident. Calman's response was never static. In the decades that followed, her intermittent footsteps became an integral part of Arles like the sound of the northwest wind. One biographer wrote: "Everyone knows the 'little old lady,' who ran all over the city and walked like a child down the steps of St. Tropheem's Church."
The ground floor of the Calments limestone building is now a supermarket. On a recent winter morning, the current homeowner took me on a tour of the third floor, just upstairs where Calmont lived. It's easy to imagine waking up every day, dragging her feet through a corridor covered with white tiles and decorated with red Euretan crosses, warming up in front of a fireplace with ornately carved walnut mantelpieces, opening the floor-to-ceiling shutters to let in the southern light. On the roof, a faded sign glitters in the sun: the CALMENT House.
In 1969, when Armand was 94 years old, her notary bought her apartment. The transaction was made under the French en viager system, under which the buyer agreed to make regular payments for the property in which the seller continued to reside. In this case, the buyer is basically betting on the seller's death rate. The Apartments in Carmans proved to be an extremely bad investment. By the time the notary died in 1995, he had spent nearly $200,000, more than double the value of the place, but had never moved in.
When Calmont was almost 100 years old, she was still riding a bicycle. On the eve of her birthday, the mayor of Arles offered to organize a celebration. Calmont refused, calling the mayor a communist. Soon after, she changed her attitude and went to the Municipal Hall to meet him. "There were a few people in the waiting room," he said later. "I didn't find a centenarian. In fact, she was right in front of my eyes. A small woman in a gray suit and a hat with a pretty veil. I noticed she was wearing high heels and sewn stockings. She was very elegant, looking twenty years younger. ”
At the age of one hundred and eleven, Carman was still living alone in her apartment on Rue Gambetta, where she had never thought of installing a modern heating system. One day she climbed onto the table, thawed the boiler with the flames of a candle, and made a small fire. Before the weather improved, she agreed to move to a local nursing home called Maison du Lac. She eventually stayed. In 1988, at the age of 112, she was briefly identified as the "Patriarch of Humanity," the oldest person in the world. Soon after, the title was awarded to a Florida woman three months older than her, who was diagnosed with "post-typhoid psychosis" and spent 75 years in a psychiatric hospital where doctors no longer believed in the disease's existence. In 1991, the old woman died at the age of one hundred and sixteen, and Carment became the longest-lived person known to be alive.
A team of three researchers who spent years verifying Calment's age – victor Lèbre, her personal physician; Geriatric specialist Michel Allard; Demographer Jean-Marie Robine called her a "strong person." At lark House, she maintains a strict schedule, getting up at 6:45 a.m., praying, doing aerobics, and listening to classical music on her body. She proudly told The Paris Race that her breasts were still as strong as "two little apples." At night, she insisted that someone else flatten her bed, as if she were a guest at the hotel. Behind her back, the nurses called her "Commander." She quit smoking at the age of one hundred and seventeen, but never gave up drinking a glass of Porto wine every night.
The longer Carman lived, the more famous she became. On Grandmother's Day, a famous TV presenter gave her a kilogram of chocolate. "I want a ton!" Longevity replied. A few weeks later, two trucks appeared. Even validators are dazzled by their subject matter. They recorded hours of conversations with her and excerpted them from the later book Les 120 Ans de Jeanne Calment. Occasionally, she uses a very outdated word (like Mahon, a round-bottom barge built by her father) so that validators have to look it up. "We were really in a state of egyptian antiquarian excitement as we walked through an unexplored labyrinth of pyramids and discovered an unknown room full of treasure," they wrote. Armand lived through 20 French presidents and also through periods of terrorism that no one remembers. She died on 4 August 1997, the cause of death is unknown. She was buried in her family's grave and did not rest until early last year.
In November 2018, the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda publicly attacked Jeanne Carmant for the first time. In an interview, Valery Novoselov, a geriatric specialist and director of the Gerontology Branch of the Moscow Society of Naturalists, announced his intention to refute Calman's claim to the title of longevity. Novoselov was a burly man who was a doctor in the Russian army. He said he looked at some of The Carman's pictures and found that she didn't have the physical features that a person her age should have. "In the photo of 110-year-old Jenny, I saw a strong woman younger than 90," he said.
He expressed his doubts to Nikolay Zak, a mathematician he knew on Facebook. Unlike Novoselov, Zach has a disheveled face and has rarely published since he published his paper in 2007. He is a glassblower who manufactures flasks and beakers for the Department of Chemistry of Moscow State University. Out of curiosity, he agreed to investigate Carment's case. Using a centenarian database, he calculated that the probability of a person surviving to the age of 122 was "extremely small." As Zach explained to Komsomolskaya Pravda, the numbers told him that Armand could not have lived that long.
He began searching online. He found it strange that Carman did not mention the cholera that swept through Arles in 1884; When she moved out of the apartment, she found a relative who burned her personal belongings; Her grandson called her Manzane, which is a compound word for maman and the childish pronunciation of her name. When it comes to her family, Armand is often vague. ("It's a useless question!") Once, when an interviewer asked her if she loved her grandson, she cried. A 1930s ID card said her eyes were black, but at the end of her life, a report showed her eyes were gray. In addition, according to the records on the card, Carman's height in middle age was one hundred and fifty-two centimeters. If this is true, then according to one record, how could she remain 150 centimeters tall when she was 114 years old, with almost no drop in height? Zach, meanwhile, believes her signature has changed dramatically over the years, forming a circular "j."
There is also a story about Van Gogh, who confused her husband with her father. In addition, Carmante told her validators that she was escorted to school by a maid named Marthe Touchon. Census documents confirm that in the early 19th century, there was a Matisse man working in the Calment family. Her name was Marthe Fousson, and a variation of that name seemed plausible because Carmante had a hard time pronouncing in the last moments of her life. However, when Zach tracks down Fosson's birth certificate, he discovers a strange discrepancy: Matt Fawson is ten years younger than Jenny Carlmont, so it's unlikely she'll be sent to school.
Zak began fiddling with Photoshop, examining Calment's lower lip, the skin on her chin, the tip of her nose, and the shape of her skull at different ages. He soon developed a theory that the world-known person (fêted, aka Jeanne Calment) was actually her daughter Yvonne. According to Zach, Jeanne died in 1934, but the Carman family handed over her body to the authorities in Yvonne's name to evade inheritance taxes. This, he said, could explain "the strange cohabitation relationship between mother-in-law and son-in-law; The "grandson" called "grandmother" "mom," not to mention the lucrative travel deal. He believes that over the course of more than 60 years, a family secret has evolved into a national conspiracy. Komsomol Pravda declared that the reputation of Kalmante's endorsers would soon be "shattered like a soap bubble."
Those gilded-aged proclamations and huge cakes are often shrouded in an atmosphere of revelry, but they are vital to science, which relies on extreme examples to define the possibilities in its sense. For the general public, super centenarians — people who live to or over 100 years old — are messengers of the past, while for biologists, they are messengers of the future. Super centenarians often look and feel younger than they actually are, and they tend to avoid diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's and diabetes, which have claimed the lives of most of their peers. Some scientists believe that clues to extend and improve human lifespan are embedded in their DNA.
Herodotus once wrote about the longevity, a legendary people who drank milk and ate cooked meat and "lived to be 120 years old." Matushara is thought to have lived for nearly a thousand years. Victorians were obsessed with the phenomenon of longevity and tried to exploit the empire's natural resources to tap into the fountain of youth. In 1873, William Thoms, a librarian at the House of Lords, proposed an age-verification system that is more or less in use today. Through archival research, he debunked the legend of Thomas Parr. A native of Shropshire, Parr impressed Count Arundel with his longevity, and in 1635 he asked Parr to go to London in a palanquin to meet the King. Parr died shortly thereafter, allegedly at the age of 152. After a thorough autopsy — the King's coroner examined Parr's genitals and concluded that he had been sexually active at the age of 14 — Parr was buried in Westminster Abbey.
According to a 2010 paper, Typologies of Extreme Longevity Myths, 65 percent of people who claim to be 110 are wrong or lying. For those who claim to be 115 years old, the turnover rate is 98 percent. Sometimes people don't know their true age. Other times, people exaggerate for reasons of prestige, economic interests, religious beliefs, family honors, or regional or ethnic chauvinism. Pension fraud, the desire to evade or enlist in military service, and administrative errors are often responsible for age declaration errors. (The United States did not have a centralized birth registration system until 1933.) Some people's motivations are as unpredictable as human nature. In the 1950s, people pretended to be veterans of the Confederacy to maintain the myth of the Immortality of the South: "If we can't defeat them, we can live longer than them." Norris McWhirter, co-founder of Guinness World Records, writes, "No subject is more easily obscured by vanity, deception, lies, and deliberate fraud than the limits of human longevity."
This is the only known photograph of Jenny (right) and her daughter Yvonne as adults.
In an area plagued by data quality issues, Jeanne Calment has long been considered the gold standard. This is partly due to chance: because she married her cousin, she had the same name throughout her life, and she spent her life in Arles, which holds some of the best-preserved archives of municipalities in the world. Her validators worked with genealogists to reconstruct The Family Tree of Carmente seven generations ago. Thomas' verification method requires five types of "evidence." They have dozens, including Carman's birth certificate, her marriage certificate, and the 17 census documents she appeared on, dating back to 1876.
Questions about The Calmont record have occasionally surfaced over the years, but little has been achieved. A book on the French insurance industry, published in 2007, claimed that an insurance company had discovered The true identity of Armand in the 90s, but that French authorities did not want to undermine "a figure that has become a myth." Scientists have also questioned Calman. Leonid Gavrilov and Natalia Gavrilova, demographers at the University of Chicago, write that Calman's 122-year lifespan is "particularly controversial" because it easily surpasses its competitors. The second-longest-lived man died in 1999 at the age of 119. Geriatrics specialist Tom Kirkwood asked Carman in a 1999 book, "Would she be a liar?" He concluded, "Any act of deception by Madame Carmans requires extraordinary foresight and the connivance of surviving relatives, and we should drive this idea out of our minds." Even Calit's validators explored the possibility of conversion in a 2000 publication, but speculated it was a "crazy" idea.
In gerontology, three years is like a century. According to Gompertz's Law, proposed by the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz in 1825, the mortality rate for adults doubles every 8 years of age. In other words, no matter how likely you are to die in 2020, you're twice as likely to die by 2028 and four times as likely you are to die by 2036. But the Gompertz curve appears to flatten out after about 100 years of age, forming what some scientists call a "plateau of late-life mortality." Gavrilov and Gavrilov explain that if the decline in mortality in old age is accurate, then this may indicate that there is no fixed limit to human lifespan. Scientists disagree on whether periods of stagnation in senile mortality are the result of erroneous data.
The passage of time tends to calm controversy, but in the Case of Calman, the passage of time only stirs up dust. As the world's population continues to grow, there are no people who live to be 122 years old. More than 20 years after Carman's death, her record lives on, making her a more compelling outsider in each of the past years. Either she lived longer than anyone else, or she did a daring hoax. As one observer wrote, "Both of these situations are highly unlikely life stories, but one is true." In Les 120 Ans de Jeanne Calment , her endorsers recreate the only known picture of two women in the Home of Carman as adults. In the photo, Yvonne appears to be sitting on a windowsill. Jenny stood to her left, behind the table, looking down at a basket of flowers and a wrapped gift. Both women were wearing white shirts and dark sweaters. The photo is accompanied by seductive text: "Jenny and Yvonne, her daughter." Which one is which one?"
On December 19, 2018, Nikolay Zak released a preprint of a paper that had not yet been peer-reviewed in academia to researchgate, a social network for scientists. The article begins by quoting a quote from the Book of Genesis: "The Lord said, 'Men will die, and my spirit will not fight with them forever; Their days will be one hundred and twenty years"), and in more appropriate language, reiterated the arguments he and Novoselov had made in Komsomol Pravda, adding some new details. On a single page, Zach solves complex mathematical equations; The next day, he would cite Wikipedia or the Daily Mail. Sometimes, his logic jumps out of the realm of pure imagination. "In the nursing home, Jenny herself was unable to destroy the documents, and she turned to the help of a distant relative," he wrote, referring to Calmont's decision to burn most of her private documents. "Most likely, it's the result of calm calculations and desperate needs, not sentimentality."
Zach's paper, while unconventional, is fascinating. French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) received news that on New Year's Eve, many newspapers published articles about the controversy. Soon, Calmont's story became an "event", a name used in France to describe a dramatic episode that would more or less certainly escalate. France 2, which aired "enigma of Jeanne Calment" in primetime, studied "the crazy assumptions of two Russian researchers" and quoted experts as comparing the Russian approach to "fake news."
If Aubrey de Grey had not intervened, the case could remain a major concern for geriatricians and the French. Born in London in 1963, de Grey is an elegant panjandrum with a wild beard in the "anti-aging movement". After working in the field of artificial intelligence, he began studying biology and earned his PhD from Cambridge University at the age of 37. Now, as chief scientific officer of the Neglectable Aging Engineering Strategy Research Foundation (SENS), a nonprofit based in Mountain View, California, he is trying to develop drug therapies to reverse aging. He claimed that there are still people who can live more than a thousand years.
Species such as sea anemones and hydras show no signs of aging, and many researchers believe that aging is not inevitable. As geriatric specialist Tom Kirkwood has written, "Aging is the result of the gradual accumulation of unrepaired defects in our body's cells and tissues while we are alive, rather than the result of some positive mechanism of death and destruction." In recent years, Silicon Valley tycoons have been eager to buy something you can't buy, which has sparked a 'lifespan' space race. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has donated at least $5 million to DeGrey's project. In 2011, after inheriting his mother's inheritance, De Grey himself donated another $13 million. Some sort of eccentric behavior only added to his aura. Commenting on the 2014 documentary "The Immortalists," the L.A. Times wrote: "De Grey would relax with a pint of beer in a local bar and occasionally have a nude picnic with his much older wife."
De Grey is editor-in-chief of regenerative research, a journal of biological gerontology that published an article by Zach in February 2019, "Evidence that Jeanne Carman died in 1934 instead of 1997." The article was written on the basis of his preprint, with some changes and new conjectures. Remarkably, Zak believes that Yvonne's photograph shows the presence of fibroids — a fleshy lump on the tip of her nose that matches the lump on Carmante's photographs of old age. "Interestingly, the fibroid was not present in later photographs, which suggests it was removed," he wrote, to explain that Calment as an older woman did not have a photograph of this fibroma. Earlier, Zach raised the possibility of exhuming Carman's body; Now he's coming up with another way to detect her DNA. As part of the Chronos Project, Kalmante reportedly provided researchers with a blood sample. The Kronos Project is a groundbreaking survey of more than 1,000 French centenarians conducted in the 1990s by the Fondation Jean Dausset-CEPH, a renowned genetic research center. Zach asserts that "the biological material of the man who died in 1997" is likely still in the warehouse.
Geriatric Specialist S. A. Thompson at the University of Illinois at Chicago Jay Olshansky told me: "I don't think the quality of this paper is very high. If I were an editor, I wouldn't accept it. Many readers were puzzled: Why did De Grey decide to grant Zach recognition of academic prestige? Bizarre conspiracy theories are constantly emerging. Is de Grey, an "international adjunct professor" at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, somehow allied with the Russians? Is it a big pharma company? Putin? Or was it that techno-survivalist groups, both de Grey and Zach, members of the Lifeboat Foundation, were infiltrated by Russian spies?" They're the bad guys, they're playing dirty games," Robert Young, a consultant at Guinness World Records and director of the Gerontology Research Group, told me. The group is responsible for maintaining a database of super centenarians. "It's a man-made argument — we don't even think it's controversial."
Kalmante's validators suddenly had to defend the work they had done 25 years ago. One of them, Victor Lèbre, was dead. Michel Allard, a geriatric specialist, has retired and lives in a village in central France. When I talked to him, he seemed a little amused about the whole thing. He initially thought there was a possibility of fraud, but he flipped through his documents and concluded that the idea was ridiculous. "I tried to imagine a scenario, but can you imagine anyone doing that?" He said. "In a way, we need to be rational." As for DNA, he said, "Not in my fridge." ”
The third verifier was Jean-Marie Robbien, director of the French national health research institute INSERM. He took seriously the Russian attacks on his reputation. "It's nonsense, not just nonsense, but it's a hostile approach, not a scientific one," he told me. "Why did they launch this operation like a kamikaze?" Why did they veto 60 weak arguments?" Robin believes Putin or the KGB has nothing to do with the matter. He believes de Grey wants access to Calman's blood, which is said to be stored in the Dorse Foundation's frozen biobank.
Claudine Selena was a little girl when she saw Jenny Carman near the school. Her mother had just come to pick her up. "You know, Grandma Carman is coming," she said, as a long, thin figure sped down the street. The Serena family did not like the local high bourgeoisie. "My grandfather was a communist, and Jenny didn't like communists because she accused them of causing the Russian Revolution," Serena explains. Like Carman, her grandfather lived in Arles almost all his life. "He'll know the difference between her and her daughter," Serena said. "If he had the slightest suspicion, he would have denounced her."
We sat in the courtyard of a Café family in Arles, next to Cécile Pellegrini, another local, Arlésienne. They are all members of a Facebook group called Contre Enquête sur l 'Enquête Jeanne Calment (a counter-investigation of the Jeanne Calment Investigation), which used the collective ingenuity of more than 1,000 ordinary people to try to justify Calment. Neither Serena nor Pellegrini could believe what they were in. Selena retired from the Durak Nursing Home, where she worked as a caregiver for 15 years, 10 of which cared for Kalmante. "She had small eyes with sharp eyes," she recalled. "Very humble, 'ma fill' and so on." She added, "I don't like her, so I'm fair. Pellegrini is a social worker who usually spends time online posting photos of her four cats. Now the two spend hours a day scouting and arguing with Zach. (They were brave enough to get him to join Facebook's group.) )
"This is James Bond," Serena said.
I asked them why they were involved.
"Still, it stings me," Serena said. "We're not idiots. Even more insulting is that Zach doesn't believe us. ”
"It's like we're hiding a secret villain," Pellegrini said.
"He lives behind his computer, on the other side of the world," Selena added.
Arles' energy source is electricity. Rhône has been the lifeblood of the city for thousands of years, but the city is interior-facing, as if it were too vain to recognize its benefactor. Plant flowers in Arles and smash Roman ruins with a shovel. The northwest wind may blow your teeth out. Christian Lacroix, a designer born there, once described a gloomy hue: "the funeral blue of the cypress trees" and "the sky is baked white." Van Gogh painted the city in violet, cobalt, gold and yellow-green. As Lacroix said, "It's not so much Arles that he painted Van Gogh with color, but rather that Van Gogh painted Arles with color." Serena mentions that her great-grandmother slept straight in a chair to preserve her traditional Arlésienne hairstyle.
Zach argues that the Arles are too close to the Carman case to remain rational. But counter-investigators are conducting a meticulous defense. They initially overturned Zach's theory about the karmuntz family's economic motives. One of the group's finest researchers, a telecommunications engineer named François Robin-Champigneul, noted that by 1934 the family's inheritance tax might have reached 6 percent of Jeanne's total assets of about 250,000 francs. It was a speed they could surely do, especially considering that in 1926, the organization discovered that Jenny had inherited a small fortune from her father.
In addition, Yvonne had to pretend to be her father's wife. Equally incredible, seven-year-old Freddie would neither notice his mother taking his grandmother's place nor accept the shift, saying nothing about it for the rest of his life. Only a few people who have seen the two families together are still alive. One of them, Gilbert Mery, whose grandfather was Jenny's cousin, told Le Journal du Dimanche that the switch theory was "complete idiotic." Recalling the tradition of walking in Arles, she said, "We look at who walks with whom, and we pay attention to whether someone has changed her clothes." "Can you imagine if, all of a sudden, people were seeing no longer Aunt Jenny, but Yvonne?"
Zach quickly came up with a new reason for the identity switch: Jenny was infected with tuberculosis, which the family falsely claimed to be infected with in order to protect their livelihood from social stigma. Why did the Carmenzs cover up Jenny's tuberculosis and lie that Yvonne died of tuberculosis? In Zach's script, Yvonne first contracted the disease and transmitted it to Jenny around 1926. Over the next few years, Jenny began to develop symptoms. Fearing that news of her illness would affect the store's business, she began to spend most of her time outside of Arles. Zach notes that in a special report in France 2, a 1993 medical student's paper on Jeanne Carmang was blurred. Séquelles pleural-pleural effusion, or accumulation of fluid around the lungs, sometimes a sign of tuberculosis infection – such words are merely visible. He believed that Yvonne had recovered from the disease. In her mother's absence, she would occasionally sign important documents with her mother's ID card. Fraud would have been temporary, but once it began, it could not be stopped.
Some members of the Facebook group called themselves "Jenny's Angels." They continued to discover new evidence, such as a 1983 letter from a family member in which Carmante used the abbreviation for décembre—that —"Xbre," which was popular in the 19th century. Calment told her validators stories about her tailor, her midwife, and her math teacher. This group found all of them in ancient documents, and they lived at the right time and place. "No matter how you format a person, I can't imagine them saying something like that," Karen Ritchie, a neuropsychologist who examined Kalmant in 1993, told me. She also said That Carmante had already said the name of her wedding tableware manufacturer.
Carmante's piano teacher Césarie Gachon proved to be a convincing eyewitness from the grave. The documents confirm that Jiachun, who was born in 1867, lived in an apartment behind his parents' bakery, as Calmont once recalled. To rule out the possibility that Yvonne had the same memory, a panelist checked several censuses. In 1911, Jenny was 36 years old, Yvonne was 13 years old, the bakery was gone, and Gachan's parents died. "Well, these can't be Yvonne's memories, but Jenny's," the member wrote on Facebook. "It seems to me that it is too precise for a daughter to hear them from her mother and remember them 80 years later."
In the comments, Zach interjected that Carman once said that she had been playing the piano since she was seven. Gachamp was only 14 years old at the time, so, as Zach writes, "this is another reason for identity change." ”
The photo was taken in 1989, when she was 114 years old
As for the tailor, Zach argues that if she was "a famous womenswear designer, she could have left a label on her skirt with her name on it, and people would remember her after her death." ”
One member replied sarcastically, "The celebrities in Arles are not like Chanel."
The group's most important findings concerned Yvonne, whose life was apparently short and far less well known than her mother's longevity. A letter shows that in 1928, Yvonne was so ill that Joseph Billot asked for a 5-year leave from the army. "It was a pity that he left the army, but his interests and the health of his wife forced him to go to Midi, who lived near Arles," wrote one of Billot's superiors. Newspaper articles saved on microfilm described Yvonne's funeral — a public event rather than the rushed funeral of a family trying to escape through a body switch as one would expect. In Saint Tropem, a priest presided over the final ceremony and officiated at the funeral Mass. According to one account, a group of "exceptionally large" mourners set out from Bilot's residence, where they could see the bodies, according to local custom.
One of Yvonne's photographs is particularly mysterious. In 1995, it first appeared on the cover of a special issue of Le Figaro and was mistaken for a photograph of Jeanne. Now everyone agrees that the subject of this photo is Yvonne, but questions about its origin have always existed. This photo was apparently taken in the mountains in the summer. In the distance you can see fir trees and a log cabin. In the foreground, Yvonne stands on a balcony with an ornate railing, with an open parasol on her right shoulder. Her dark side-splitting wave head was pulled back with a hairpin, and she appeared to be wearing a stylish sleeveless camper shirt and churning pants. She didn't look much like her mother. She looked determined, like the kind of person who would remember to label dishes with a lid on them.
The team initially thought the photo was taken in the French Alps, possibly the Pyrenees. A member then started searching the internet for information about nursing homes. It reminded her of a photograph of a sanatorium with its balcony railing looking just like it did in Yvonne's photograph. The other members followed the road. One of them analyzed 11 photos of cement walls he found. Soon, they were identified: photographs showed Yvonne, 33, standing on the east terrace of the Belveder Sanatorium in Lesing, Switzerland, in August 1931. Yvonne must have been to a tuberculosis treatment center. Jenny had no such evidence.
On March 10, 2019, Aubrey de Grey emailed Kalman's validators Jean-Marie Robine and Michel Allard. De Grey reminded them that a blood sample from Carman was thought to have been kept at the Dorse Foundation in Paris. The sample test could solve Kalman's identity problem, as Jenny usually has 16 different great-great-grandparents, while Yvonne only has 12 because her parents are close relatives. De Grey writes: "I personally believe that the current balance of evidence does not support the hypothesis of identity conversion – in other words, I think it is likely that Jenny will actually live to be 122 years old." However, he felt the discussion around Calment offered "a huge opportunity." He continued:
I'm not happy to see the two of you publicly criticized for failing to uncover all sorts of evidence that has recently been discovered by others 20 years ago, including several mid-century photos... I believe that if you apply, getting into the cells of Dorset prison will be a powerful way to end the unjust criticism of your work.
Two weeks later, the SENS Research Foundation hosted an anti-aging conference in Berlin, where hundreds of attendees gathered to pay up to $900 in tickets to meet "leading researchers from around the world." De Grey invited Nicolas Zach to speak. In his profile at the conference, he quoted De Grey as saying: "Zach's just-published investigative report cast considerable doubt on The actual age of death of Carman and provides credibility for the possibility of her exchanging identities with her daughter." On the second day of the conference, Zach, wearing a black T-shirt emblazoned with the head of Charles Darwin, gave a "special speech" on the identity-shifting hypothesis. De Grey also joined him, calling It "shameful" that Calmont's blood samples were forgotten. He added that if tested, "I wouldn't say this information will tell us about the Fountain of Youth, but it will certainly provide some cool ideas for our new experiment." ”
Last November, when I spoke to De Grey, I asked him questions about the conversion hypothesis. "I have more important things to do," he said. "I am a prominent figure in the field of geriatrics and I am committed to saving lives. So it's not a big deal for me, you have to know. De Grey denied he wanted a blood sample of Carman for his own use. He appears to be trying to maintain fair treatment of the case in public, while using this to shake the Dorset Foundation. He had asked Arad and Robin to recruit Yves Christen, a prominent French biologist, to participate in the campaign to retrieve blood samples. He said to me, "I believe that baptism is a matter of course for people like you." "The only best thing you can do to save lives and accelerate your victory over aging is to find Christine and let him know he has the ability to go to Dorset and have them release that sample!"
Examination of Carmante DNA brought ethical difficulties. Carmante provided samples under anonymous conditions, but could be judged by her age. In addition, it is only designed for certain purposes. "Jeanne Calment was involved in the Kronos Project within the context of informed consent, and she signed an informed consent form to prevent the use of any information outside of the project," said Jean-François Deleuze, scientific director of the Dorse Foundation.
Some of the people I spoke to argued that the violation of these conditions was justified in some cases, but in the Calcin case it was unclear whether the benefits outweighed the costs. It would be interesting to find out the truth about Jenny Carman, but it certainly wasn't necessary. Members of the counter-investigation team believe that Armand's identity is already clear; They suspect that questions about it are used as wedges, opening the door to a wide variety of tests. The conspiracy surrounding this sample has grown so large that it fills a gap in authoritative information. Neither Arad nor Robin responded to De Grey's emails. "These people's naïveté," Robin told me. "You go to the best jeweler in the world and ask him to give you his biggest diamond?"
As the debate continued, Zach's theories became more and more Baroque. As soon as one idea was refuted, he came up with another. It turns out that Calman's height in his later years was actually one hundred and forty-three centimeters, which reflects the expected decline in stature. The censor gave the photo of Jenny and Yvonne the caption "Which one is which one?" - Seems to come from a soapy slogan. Zach eventually abandoned the fibroid argument.
Even Zach's opponents praised his tenacity and unusually rich imagination. His latest idea was that the only surviving joint photograph of Jenny and Yvonne had been taken at the Lessing Sanatorium. In this case, Jeanne was the patient and Yvonne was just visiting. The flower in the photo may be carline thistle, "a stemless alpine plant native to Switzerland used as an herbal remedy for lung diseases including tuberculosis," he said. In the photo, the right side of Jenny's body is in shadow. Zach claimed that he was able to recognize that the right side of her jacket was shorter than the left. From this, he concluded that Jenny might have had her right arm amputated, "probably before she came to Lessing." ”
Even in his most uncompromising moments, Zach welcomes debate. At the end of November, he agreed to meet me at a pizzeria near his home in Moscow. He wears a red T-shirt and black sweatpants, with yellow circles under his eyes. I learned through my own research on the Internet that his father was a brilliant mathematician. Nicolas Zach, who had tried to follow in his father's footsteps in algebraic geometry, was now bent on Yvonne to succeed Jeanne. But Zach doesn't seem too interested in talking about his biography. Speaking about his glassblowing work, he said: "I'm still there, although I haven't worked for long. I just came and went. "He said he wasn't paid de Grey, as many critics say." I already have money, so that's not a problem for me. ”
Zach said he first heard of Jenny Calman was a decade ago, when he became interested in longevity. "I read about her lifestyle and knew she used olive oil, and then I did research it and found the best olive oil in the world," he said. "They went to Corfu." In the summer of 2018, Valery Novoselov, who became the head of the Gerontology branch of the Moscow Society of Naturalists, issued an appeal for papers. Zach's original subject was a naked mole rat, a hairless rodent whose front teeth look like fingernails and have an unusually long lifespan. He switched from naked mole to super centenarian.
At the pizzeria, Zach said he was "99.99%" convinced Ofcalt was a liar. I asked why few experts in the field agreed with him. "I've told you that I've gotten a lot of letters from a lot of people," he said. When I asked them by name, he said, "Whoever thinks I am right will remain silent until everything is confirmed." Talking to him is like talking to a magical no. 8 ball.
I learned from Facebook that Zach had a habit of leading people into the micro-details of Calmont's life, where bigger, more obvious issues were easily overlooked. I want him to explain some of the holes in his reasoning. If Carmante had something to hide, why would she agree to an endorsement interview? If she knew that a drop of blood could reveal her 60-year-old secret, why would she donate blood? Speaking of which, why didn't she choose to be cremated? Cremation is the ultimate way to burn personal property.
"She's a bold liar," Zach replied. "If I were her, at some point after my death, I would arrange something to show that I cheated on all of you. That would have been more fun for her, so I don't think there's anything wrong with that. She was dead and got everything she wanted. "I reminded her of the tailor, the midwife, the math teacher, the piano teacher, but he didn't budge. While eating a mushroom pizza, he added: "I am 34 years younger than my father, and I don't have a very good relationship with him, but I know the name of his math teacher."
Zach went on to say that Yvonne may have been trained. Here's a good point: Calment's validators mention in the first chapter of their book that they occasionally "re-inject" certain biographical details into conversations with her in hopes of activating dormant memories. When I spoke to Michelle Arad, I asked him if they had ever tried to re-inject false information as a form of control. He said they didn't.
I agree with Zak that validators sometimes take a positive approach to accomplishing their tasks, but I don't see evidence of a conspiracy. Zach has been lobbying for them to release recordings of interviews, suggesting they may have something to hide. I learned from Arad that the tape was in a box in his basement; He just didn't bother to fetch it. When I asked Zach about the contradictions in his theory, he was annoyed. He said, "You've completely misunderstood the recognition of extreme age." "Everyone agrees that, at extreme ages, the burden of proof rests with the plaintiffs and validators, not on the skeptics."
That morning, I met Valery Novoselov at the Zoological Museum of Moscow State University. He greeted me with the muralized wildlife on both sides of the dome entrance aisle, and we continued through a series of faded corridors—past mastodon skeletons and a glass cabinet to empty all but a set of doilies—before arriving at a dusty classroom, sitting on a long wooden table. Two of his colleagues from the Association of Naturalists joined us, and I also brought a translator. Novoselov spoke in a so loud voice that he could not even understand the translator. Novoselov, after some research on the cause of Lenin's death, turned to Jeanne Carmen. "It was taken in 1955, so she's in her 80s here," he said, pulling a picture of Calman from his laptop. "This woman is still full of estrogen – she's just entering the early stages of menopause. Obviously, in terms of hormones, she is still a woman. ”
Novoselov was still convinced that Carman could not have been 122 years old, but he did not know the possibility of a swap now. He felt that Zach, as a non-scientist, had been too hasty to publish some of his works. "We are the Soviet people, Zack is Russian," Novoserov said at one point. "We're a sim, he's a digital man." I asked Novoselov, since he believed in the importance of the scientific method, why he was willing to rely so heavily on photographs, which were notoriously easy to interpret. He began to talk about However, Calman's legs looked young. At one point, he said he had asked experts from the Investigative Committee to conduct a forensic analysis of some of the photos. The Commission of Inquiry is the equivalent of Russia's Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He had a letter from the committee, which I read later. It reads "The quality of the photos you submitted for Jenny Carman and her daughter... Those who do not meet the requirements for forensic portrait examination. ”
It feels like we're not making any progress. In my opinion, one of the most convincing points in the cases presented by Novoselov and Zach is that the collective assumptions of a society can suppress unlikely facts. Every time I find myself believing that their accusations are incredibly far-fetched, I wonder if I'm too complacent: Who would believe, for example, that Jack Nicholson's sister was actually his mother before Time magazine suddenly reported the news of Jack Nicholson in 1974?
"How old do you think I am?" I asked Novoselov.
"Seventeen," he said.
"Seriously, how old do you think I am?" This is one of your methods, observe a person and estimate his age. Write it down. ”
Novoselov was confused, but eventually I persuaded him and each of his colleagues to write down on a piece of paper what he thought was my age. One wrote 28 and the other 35. Novoselov's guess is 42. I am 39.
If there is no crime, it is difficult to find conclusive evidence. As time went by, I became more and more convinced of the veracity of Jenny Armand's records, but there were several unresolved issues that plagued me. I wanted to learn more about what insurers and the French authorities have to say about fraud in this book on the insurance industry. The source is a former employee of the French Ministry of Finance, who asked not to be named. Sometime in the 60s, an insurance company received an annuity (viagère) for jeanne Calment's apartment. Officials at the company noted that Calment was an actuarial outlier and asked the Treasury About the account, according to sources. The source's superiors signaled him not to meddle. Later, after Calment's death, an insurance company official told him she and her daughter had switched places. The official died in 2000, and the source of the story went with it.
A few months after I first spoke to Michelle Allard, I sent him an email to see if he had stumbled upon a recording of Calman's interview. "You came at the right time," he replied. He took the photos out of the basement, he said, ready to digitize them. He agreed to let me listen before him. It was crazy to hear the sounds of the 19th century, a soul reconnected with her memories, some of which I had seen on the pages. "She's never been naked!" Calmont said, La Belle Otero, she was a famous actress of the time. "Never!" She spoke passionately and not as much motivation as I thought.
In Arles, I met a woman named Maguy Raspail, a retired nurse who appeared to be the only person in town who supported Zach. She said to me, "I found Nikolai very clever, and I said to myself, maybe he can see what we French can't see." Raspar couldn't refute the many pieces of evidence that proved Kalmont's authenticity, but she did tell me something interesting. While Kalman was living at Lark House, the head nurse, Laure Meusy, told her that another nurse called Calmont "Yvonne" in front of staff and other residents. Meusy confirmed this in a text message. "She would say out loud that Jenny was her daughter, but I was her boss and she couldn't say it in front of me," she wrote. Mossy said, "It's impossible for a natural person like Jenny to lie. "I called another nurse, but she hung up as soon as I mentioned Armand's name. The second time, she didn't hang up. She said she never doubted Carman's identity. "Are you kidding me when I ask this?" Rumor has it, she said, that she had called Jenny "Yvonne." "Impossible."
The end of Jeanne Carman's life was turbulent, even dirty. As her fame grew, Maison du Lac struggled to cope with the needs of journalists and well-wishers. Meusy became her informal liaison, doing the job with a clumsy attitude that was both tough and incompetent. At the age of one hundred and twenty-one, Calment could barely speak and recorded a rap CD. One day, while she was motionless in her wheelchair, a Japanese clown kissed her on the mouth. After a documentary suggesting that Carmante was not being treated properly, the nursing home's management stepped in to transfer Mersey on the grounds of "failure to comply with the obligations of retention, caution and restraint". Visitors to Carmante are severely restricted, and her referees are forbidden to see her. Arad said, "She was thrown into the dungeon."
Carman died on a Monday in August when Les Grandes was on leave. One biographer speculates that she died of boredom. Jean-Marie Robin told me that Carlmont agreed to donate her brain to scientific research. "We had a team on standby 24 hours a day in Paris, ready to board the plane," he recalled, but Armand was buried in "extreme haste" so much that the team was unable to harvest organs. Although Carmante was a devout Catholic and celebrity, only a few were allowed to attend funerals, most of them nursing home staff. The next day, hundreds of mourners gathered at st. Tropheem's church, where she had long lived. In front of the altar was a large portrait of her, not a coffin.
Her family cemetery is located at the Clover Cemetery in Arles, at the end of a long row of mausoleums. It is a relatively modern and simple black granite monument. The names of Joseph and Freddy Billot are engraved on a plaque. In the middle of the tomb, there is a mark in the shape of an open book that reads "Jeanne Carman, 1875-1997, La doyenne de l 'humanité". Yvonne was also buried there, but without her name. "Why is it that the family's grave does not have Yvonne's name, but the names of Joseph and Frederick?" Zach wrote that a debate broke out on Facebook about the topic at that time. "The explanation for switching scenes is simple: she doesn't want her name to appear on the grave because she's still alive." But Fernando and other relatives are also buried there, and their names are not marked. According to counter-investigators, the tomb was recreated in the 1960s and is inscribed with only the names of family members who have died since then.
Jeanne Carman's secret may have been hidden in a village about an hour's drive from Arles. Renée Billot Bonnary, Freddy's widow, lives there, near the Mediterranean Sea. Born in 1926, Bernari is a retired dentist. She is one of the only remaining links to the thriving Arlesian dynasty of calments and the epoch-spanning story of her former grandmother. Several sources have told me that after Freddie's death, Bonali and Carman had an argument. The desire to keep this conflict secret could help explain why Calment chose to destroy her private documents. This can also prove her authenticity: if Calment had been involved in a hoax, it is conceivable that Bonnary would have known and would have had an incentive to expose her. I wrote a letter to Bonari and contacted one of her relatives, who eventually asked me not to bother them again.
So I went to Marseille. First, I walked from the train station to the medical school of Aix-Marseille University, where I consulted Catherine Levraud's 1993 paper Jeanne Calment: 118 Years, Prototype of Longevity. Levraud spent several months visiting Calment at Maison du Lac and kept a record of her medical history. On page 10, I found some passages that had aroused Zach's suspicions, which appeared in the special edition of France 2. It read: "Blood was reported as a 30-year-old woman in good health. However, X-rays showed high transparency due to bone demineration and a pleural effusion in the chest. Zach was right: both mother and daughter could have tuberculosis. However, this does not mean that the person who died in 1997 was Yvonne. Catherine Levraud, who now works as a doctor in Arles, told me, "Jeanne may have been infected with this disease, she didn't even know she had it." "In this group, this happens very frequently." Another point, my name is Petros Karakousis, a tuberculosis specialist and professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, who confirmed that the presence of pleural effusions can indicate previous tuberculosis infections, but says they can also be attributed to "a number of other causes, such as mild heart failure, Carlmont has." Levraud adds that it makes sense that a person who is strong enough to be able to fully recover from a disease that many of her peers have been knocked down by, would make her a super centenarian.
François Robin-Champigneul, a telecommunications engineer who calculates the Calments family estate tax, revealed to me that there may be some interesting documents in the departmental archives of Bouches-du-Rhône in Marseille. (Robin-Champigneul recently published a paper in Revival Studies defending Calment's record, and he's writing a book.) There I got in an Uber, walked through a windy square, and walked into a huge rectangular white glass building. I applied for a card, stuffed the bag into the locker, and with the help of the librarian, entered some codes on the computer. In less than twenty minutes, I was sitting in front of a thick, rickety ledger with Fernando Armand's 1943 property documents and mortgage contracts for the purchase of several properties.
The documents show an optimistic couple. Their liquidity was plentiful, and Fernando had more assets. In February 1933, they bought a country house on the outskirts of Arles. Frédérique Srocca, the granddaughter of Joseph Bílot's younger brother, remembers spending summer vacations nearby in the 60s. "She's already an 'old woman,' but still very energetic," she told me about Jenny. "She walks and walks, she walks and walks — that's the secret."
A printed six-page document records that on 28 November 1931, Jeanne, who had lived as a child in an apartment at 53 Rue Roquette, was sold for thirty-five thousand francs to a gentleman named Honoré Mistral and his wife, Madame Clarice Loux. At some point, someone draws a line in some parts of it with a dark green oil pen. I flipped through it, trying to concentrate. Entrée en jou cheerful, régime dotal, mandatory feoncières. The archives will soon be closed.
It wasn't until a few weeks later, in Paris, that I understood the importance of this document. Its final part shows that both Jeanne Calment and Arles' notary, Lucien Arnaud, attended the closing ceremony in 1931. Arnault managed Jenny in 1896 and Yvonne in 1926. He is also the head of the local chapter of the Union Française, where the Carmante family often attends balls. When Yvonne got married, Jeanne, Yvonne and Arno got together and signed a marriage contract. According to the documents in my hand, even less than five years later, Jeanne stood before Arno again and signed an agreement for the sale of 53 Roquette Street. In Zach's script, Yvonne began imitating her mother in 1931. She would appear in front of Arnold her hair dyed white on the signature with a not quite right ring J.
It was almost impossible for Yvonne to fool Arnold. She could have bribed him, but the documents I saw also showed that Jenny had appeared before his successor, Louis David, in 1933 and 1942. In either case, it was impossible for Yvonne to show an ID, whether it was fake or something else, as Zack had said. Arnold and David knew Jenny well, so they didn't ask for proof of identity. How many people does Yvonne have to woo? Two notaries, a priest, a seven-year-old boy, a large group of mourners, the whole city? The theory made no sense, and as much as I knew it, I was already wondering what Zach would say next. ♦