People in France remember the summer of 1997 for the deaths of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, and Jeanne Calment. The first became a household name by marrying into royalty; the second, by caring for the world’s sick and poor. Jeanne Calment, however, was an accidental icon, her celebrity the result of a form of passivity. For a hundred and twenty-two years, five months, and fourteen days, Calment managed not to die.

She was born at home on the Rue du Roure, in Arles, one of only four addresses she ever held. 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. Plastic, tea bags, public trash cans, and the zipper had yet to come into the world. The life expectancy for a French woman was forty-five. Approximately one billion five hundred million people walked the planet, and Calment would outlive them all.

Later in life, Calment claimed to have known Vincent van Gogh, telling different versions of an encounter with him in 1888. “Van Gogh was very ugly. Ugly like a louse,” she once remembered. “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. Calment sometimes said that her father waited on him. Her father, however, was a shipbuilder; the store actually belonged to her husband’s family. Another time Calment recalled, “My husband said to him, ‘I present to you my wife.’ ” This recollection was also blurred: Calment, an adolescent in 1888, didn’t marry for another eight years.

She had known her husband, Fernand Calment, her entire life. Their paternal grandfathers were brothers, and their paternal grandmothers were sisters, making Jeanne and Fernand double second cousins. They had a daughter, Yvonne, in 1898. Jeanne never worked, but led a busy life of recreational pursuits, including tennis, roller-skating, and stalking wild boar. The Calments lived in grand apartments above the family store. Jeanne appeared occasionally, cutting an imperious figure. “Madame Calment wanted to impose her taste on me,” a woman later said, remembering a girlhood errand to buy fabric. “Stubborn, I stuck with my choice, replying in a tone that didn’t please her. I haven’t forgotten the pair of slaps.”

In 1934, Yvonne died of complications from tuberculosis, leaving behind a husband, Colonel Joseph Billot, and a seven-year-old son, Freddy. Jeanne and Fernand took care of the boy as though he were their own. In 1942, some friends of the Calments invited the couple to their country house. During the visit, Fernand gorged on cherries, while Jeanne had one or two. The cherries were tainted with chemicals, and, within a few months, Jeanne was a widow. Two years later, women got the vote in France. The Eiffel Tower was just past fifty. Calment was sixty-seven, with nearly half her life in front of her.

Following the death of Calment’s husband, she and her son-in-law, Joseph, shared an apartment. Freddy, an otolaryngologist, lived nearby with his wife. In 1963, Calment lost her last intimates. That January, Joseph died after a long illness. In August, Freddy was killed in a car accident. Calment coped by never staying still. In the decades that followed, her staccato footfall was as integral to Arles as the sound of the mistral, the rattling Provençal wind. One biographer wrote, “Everyone knew the ‘little old lady’ who dashed all over town, who went down the steps of St. Trophime church like a kid.”

The ground floor of the Calments’ limestone building is now occupied by a supermarket. On a recent winter morning, the current owner showed me around the third floor, above where Calment lived. It was easy to imagine her waking each day, shuffling down a hallway of white tiles with red Occitan crosses, warming herself in front of a fireplace with an ornately carved walnut mantelpiece, and unlatching the floor-to-ceiling shutters, to let in the southern light. On the roof, a faded sign glowed in the sunshine: MAISON CALMENT.

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Shopping Cartoon by Liana Finck

When Calment was ninety-four, in 1969, her notary bought her apartment. The purchase was made under the French en viager system, in which the buyer agrees to make regular payments on a property that the seller continues to live in. In such an arrangement, the buyer essentially wagers on how quickly the seller will die. The Calment apartment proved to be an epically terrible investment. By the time the notary died, in 1995, he’d spent nearly two hundred thousand dollars, more than twice the value of the place, without ever taking occupancy.

As Calment approached her hundredth year, she was still riding her bicycle. Just before her birthday, the mayor of Arles offered to organize a celebration. Calment declined, calling the mayor un rouge, a Communist. Not long after, thinking better of her manners, she went to see him at the town hall. “In the waiting room, there were several people,” he later said. “I didn’t spot a centenarian. In fact, she was right in front of my eyes. A little woman in a gray suit, wearing a hat with a fine veil. I noticed her heeled shoes and seamed stockings. Very elegant, she seemed twenty years younger.”

At a hundred and ten, Calment was still living alone, in the Rue Gambetta apartment, where she had never bothered to install a modern heating system. One day, she climbed up on a table to unfreeze the boiler with the flame of a candle, starting a small fire. She agreed to move to a local retirement home, the Maison du Lac, until the weather improved. She ended up staying, and, in 1988, at a hundred and twelve, was briefly recognized as the “doyenne of humanity,” the oldest person in the world. Soon afterward, the title was given to a Florida woman three months her elder, who had spent seventy-five years in a mental hospital after being diagnosed with “post-typhoid psychosis,” a disease that doctors no longer believed existed. After the woman died, at a hundred and sixteen, in 1991, Calment became the oldest person ever known to have lived.

A team of three researchers who spent several years validating Calment’s age—Victor Lèbre, her personal doctor; Michel Allard, a gerontologist; and Jean-Marie Robine, a demographer—described her as a “tough cookie.” At the Maison du Lac, she maintained a rigid schedule, rising at six-forty-five, saying her prayers, performing calisthenics, and listening to classical music on her Walkman. She proudly told Paris Match that her breasts remained as firm as “two little apples.” At night, she insisted that her bed be turned down, as though she were a guest in a hotel. Behind her back, the nurses called her la commandante. She quit smoking at a hundred and seventeen, but never gave up having a nightly glass of port.

The longer Calment lived, the more famous she became. On Grandmother’s Day, a well-known television presenter offered her a kilo of chocolate. “I want a ton!” Calment replied. Several weeks later, two trucks showed up. Even the validators were dazzled by their subject. They recorded hours of conversations with her, excerpts of which they later published in a book, “Les 120 Ans de Jeanne Calment.” Occasionally, she’d use a word so antiquated (like mahonne, a kind of round-bottomed barge that her father had built) that the validators had to look it up. “We were truly in the state of excitation of an Egyptologist who, while walking through an unexplored labyrinth of a pyramid, discovers an unknown room filled with treasures,” they wrote. Calment lived through twenty French Presidents and survived periods of terrorism that no one even recalled. She died on August 4, 1997, of unspecified causes. She was buried in her family’s tomb, where she rested in peace until early last year.