Jeanne Calment has been on the planet for precisely 120 years and 238 days. When you're the world's oldest living human on record, you keep track of these things.
Hard of hearing, nearly blind and forced to give up cigarettes, Calment was immortalized in the Guinness Book of Records on Tuesday as the oldest known person whose date of birth can be reliably authenticated.Bracing for a media crush, she joked last weekend that she was "waiting for death and the journalists."
Calment, who lives in a nursing home in Arles in southern France, surpassed Shigechiyo Izumi of Japan, who died in 1986 after living 120 years and 237 days.
"Madame Calment's record is arguably the most important of all the 15,000 records included in the Guinness Book," said Norris McWhirter, the book's founding editor.
"After all, staying alive is the most competitive of all records. All 5.2 billion of us are at it."
There have been many reports from various countries of people saying they lived up to twice as long but with little or no proof of their birth dates. Calment's birthday is based on numerous civil and religious records.
Since 1985, Calment has been living at a nursing home that has been renamed after her. She has used a wheelchair since fracturing her leg and elbow in a fall in 1990.
Through it all, she's kept a keen sense of humor. Asked at her 120th birthday bash Feb. 21 to describe her vision of the future, she replied mischievously: "Very brief."
She's been the oldest living person since 1991, when former record-holder Carry White of the United States died at 116.
"She's in perfect health," said her physician, Victor Lebre. "She's much better than she was this past summer, when she suffered a lot from the heat. But her memory is always excellent."
What a memory. Calment vividly recalls traveling to Paris when the Eiffel Tower was still under construction and selling colored pencils to Vincent Van Gogh when he lived in Arles, "still had his ear" and frequented her father's shop.
Her father died at 94 and her mother at 86. She outlasted her husband, brother, a daughter and a grandson, so she has no direct descendants.