A week before her 121st birthday, Jeanne Calment was agitated.
"I hope you've remembered to get my shampoo," she told nursing staff in a commanding tone. "And my jewelry. I'll be needing it for the photographs."Fame may have arrived late for Madame Calment, but now that it is here, she intends to milk it. Born Feb. 21, 1875, she takes obvious pleasure in the attention she has attracted since last October, when she entered the record books as the longest-lived person ever.
"I enjoy everything about it," she says. "I enjoy it all a lot. A bit more than a lot, perhaps."
The same cannot be said of Laure Meusy, director of the Maison du Lac retirement home in Arles, Provence, southern France. Breathless and hassled, she had the unenviable task of organizing Wednesday's birthday party, an event that took on the proportions of a national celebration.
A member of the "haute bourgeoisie," Calment has for most of her life been used to the best food and wines and has a penchant for foie gras and daube, a provencal stew made with olive oil and garlic. Recently, the doctors decided that she ought to avoid such rich dishes. Although Calment is frail, blind and partly deaf, she is quite capable of expressing her opinion on matters that she considers important.
"There is a very 19th-century type of hierarchy in her relationships with other people," the Maison du Lac's doctor, Victor Lebre, says. "She treats the employees here as servants. With me, it's different. I'm an equal because of my title. But even so, it took 10 years before I could call her Jeanne."
He may be on first-name terms, but he is no closer to answering the one question that he is always asked. How is it that Calment - who watched the Eiffel Tower being built, who was a grandmother before the Great Depression and a pensioner when Germany invaded France at the start of World War II - is still around today?
Lebre shrugs. In truth, he has no idea. He knows only that until Jeanne Calment proved them wrong, the experts said human life was impossible beyond the age of 120. And if anyone had asked him whether she was a likely candidate to rewrite medical history, he would certainly have said no.