Was Jeanne Kalman, who lived for 122 years, a fraud?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Jeanne Kalman was 122 years old when she died. But last year, a Russian scientist claimed she was a fraud, sparking an international controversy about a woman who can still hold the secret of eternal life.

André-François Raffray, a lawyer from the southern French city of Arles, signed an agreement for the sale of an apartment with one of his clients in 1965 “En viager”: a form of sale of property in which the buyer pays a monthly payment until the death of the seller, when the property becomes their property.

His client, Jeanne Calment, was 90 years old and quite cheerful for her age; she liked to surprise people by jumping up from her chair in front of the hairdresser. But still, this could not last long: Raffrey simply had to fork out 2,500 francs a month and wait in the wings.

He never managed to settle there. Rafre died in 1995 at the age of 77, by which time Jeanne was 120 and one of the most famous women in France. For ten years she had not lived in her rooms above Maison-Kalman, a fabric store once run by her husband in the heart of Arles.

Instead, with each birthday plunging her deeper into the realm of the incredible, Calment lived in La Maison du Lac, a nursing home next to the city hospital. She had no close relatives - her husband, daughter and grandson died long ago - but journalists and local nobility visited her regularly.

“I have waited 110 years to become famous. I intend to get the most out of this,” she told reporters on her 110th birthday. At one of the parties, she told how she met Vincent Van Gogh as a teenager; was ugly and disheveled, and the locals called him "dingo."

The pensioner turned out to be gifted with Methuselah's endurance. Still cycling at 100, she quit smoking at only 117; her doctors concluded that she had a mental capacity equivalent to that of most eighty-year-olds.

It is enough, in any case, to play the odd Singer: “I am waiting for death … and for journalists,” she once told a journalist. At the age of 121, she recorded the rap disc "Mistress of Time". But even this "aging Michael Jordan", as one geriatrician put it, had very little to go.

By 1996, her condition had deteriorated dramatically. Using a wheelchair, mostly blind and deaf, she finally passed away on August 4, 1997. At 122 years old, she was the oldest confirmed human life in history.

Some, however, believe that time is not the only thing that makes us fools. Last year, Russian mathematician Nikolai Zak made an astonishing claim that it was not Zhanna Kalman who died in 1997, but her daughter Yvonne. Skeptically assessing the extent to which Calment surpassed the previous record holders (the closest verified entry at the time was 117), Zak delved into her biography and found many inconsistencies.

First published on Researchgate, a scholarly social networking site, and then picked up by bloggers and the Associated Press, Zach's article claimed that Jeanne Kalman did indeed die in 1934; according to official figures, it was then that Yvonne, at the age of 36, died of pleurisy. At this point, Zach argued, her daughter adopted her identity - they looked alike - and she continued to pretend for over 60 years.

When the article went viral, the French press exploded. How dare someone desecrate the national treasure, the woman was nicknamed “La doyenne de l'Humanité”? And in general, who is this upstart Russian? Zach was not even a gerontologist, an expert on aging, but a 36-year-old mathematics graduate who worked as a glassblower at Moscow State University and had not published a single work in 10 years.

Zach responded by publishing an extended article in the American journal Rejuvenation Research in January this year. He compiled a dossier of 17 biographical evidence supporting the switch theory, including unexplained physical differences between young and old Jeanne (eye color change from dark to green) and discrepancies in verbal testimony she gave while in a nursing home: she claimed to have met Van Gogh at her father's shop when Jeanne's father was a shipbuilder He also claimed that there was no public celebration of Jeanne's 100th birthday, a key landmark in checking old age.

Most importantly, he put forward a plausible motive: Yvonne took her mother's place to avoid punitive inheritance taxes, which reached 35% during the interwar period.

The debate spread throughout the French press and international gerontological circles, becoming increasingly heated. Many have dismissed the theory of Zack's spoofing as Russian-sponsored “fake news,” as Le Parisien put it.

Of course, it looked like an attack on Western science. Zach questioned the veracity of Sarah Knauss, the manager of the Pennsylvania insurance office, who died in 1999 at the age of 119. Is the Russian trying to sow doubts so that his compatriots can take a leading role in the field of gerontology?

Jeanne Kalman

For the people of Arles, it was a matter of local pride. They quickly rallied and formed a Facebook group, counterintelligence in the investigation, to sort out Zach's claims. These included distant relatives of Kalment and others who knew her; although some said she was arrogant and sarcastic, they didn't want her reputation to be tarnished. They had easy access to the city's archives, while Zach had never been to Arles: what could he know? He fired in response to their open counterintelligence forum: perhaps the Arlesians were simply blinded by their loyalty. “Note that from a distance you can see that the Earth is not flat,” he wrote.

Both camps were equally adamant. First, that the woman who died at Maison du Lac was the longest living human being. Second, that she was a talented and almost incomprehensibly determined swindler. What was the real Madame Calment?

The age of 122 seems to be challenging the limits of the possible. Even two decades later, with life expectancy still rising, no one has come close to Jeanne Kalman's.

In 1825, British actuary Benjamin Gompertz proposed a model for predicting human mortality, according to which the risk of death increases exponentially with age, doubling every eight years. His "Gompertz curve" was quickly taken up by the insurance industry. In the year after the 100th anniversary, the probability of death is approximately 50%. Knowing this, Jeanne Kalman's record looks like an even more statistically long life cycle.

At Trinketai Cemetery in Arles, little stands out for the person with the world's longest streak of luck other than a small baseboard engraved with “La doyenne de l'Humanité” on her grave.

Atop the dappled dark gray marble of Calment's family tomb is a pot of fake chrysanthemums and yellowed succulent. It is curious that Joseph Billot, Jeanne's son-in-law and Yvonne's husband, as well as her grandson Frederic Billot, are marked on the list of deceased family members, but her daughter is not …

Shortly after Zack's article was published, a group of "French counterintelligence" began scouring the local archives for evidence that undermined his theory.

Distant members of the Kalman and Billo families opened their photo albums and personal papers. In the spirit of open debate, Zak was also welcomed to the forum, where he continued to continually comment on the new findings. He was collegial on the surface, admitting that he and counterintelligence had a common goal: truth.

But digging in the past has begun to pay dividends. In one new photo, donated by a family member, Yvonne posed on a balcony with an umbrella against the backdrop of the mountains. A clever spy of postcards and Google maps has revealed it to be part of the Belvedere sanatorium in Leysin, Switzerland - according to Yvonne's pleurisy diagnosis, often a symptom of tuberculosis.

Another document appeared to confirm the seriousness of her condition: her husband, Army Colonel Joseph, was granted five years of leave to care for her in June 1928. Unfortunately, the sanatorium closed in 1960, and its records have not survived.

If the substitution did occur, keeping this fiction in plain sight would require an extraordinary level of deception. Yvonne would have had to share the house with Jeanne's widower, Fernand, her own father, until his death in 1942; Fernand would have had to marry his daughter to his wife. Yvonne would have had to force her seven-year-old son Frederic, when “Jeanne” died, to stop calling her “Maman”.

Many others had to be complicit. If Zach knew people from Arles or Jeanne Kalman, the group argued, he would know how incredible this is. The conspiracy would be difficult to sustain in a tight-knit population of 20,000.

“If people knew about the fraud, they would not protect it,” she says.

Perhaps the most important blow from the counterintelligence group - not exactly fatal, but close - came over Zach's idea of a financial motive. The Russian claimed that Yvonne was trying to avoid 35% inheritance tax, but the group's research led them to believe it would be more like 6-7% - a rate the family could handle with Fernand Calment's sizable assets.

But Zach refused to budge. Only DNA analysis from the Trinketail cemetery or a Kalman blood sample rumored to be stored at a Paris research institute could resolve the issue, he argued. But women in the counterintelligence group believe he has gone too far down the rabbit hole to consider any theory other than his own.

"Even if [the DNA test] proves that it was Jeanne, he will never accept it," says Pellegrini. "He will say the tests were falsified."

There is some debate about what happens to mortality rates in extremely old age. Some researchers believe that they continue to rise along with the Gompertz curve until the risk of death in a given year is absolute - with an effective ceiling for human life somewhere between 119 and 129.

Others believe that such a ceiling does not exist, thanks to a phenomenon known as "mortality slowdown": an increase in mortality after 105 years. But there are doubts about this as well, which is due to the frequent erroneous messages of supercentenaries (mainly due to clerical error, not fraud). With such a small dataset, even a few errors can skew our understanding of human limits (a gerontology research team based in Los Angeles estimates there are about 1,000 living supercendents).

Russian mathematician Nikolai Zak at Moscow University, November 2019.

Jean-Marie Robin, the man who continued his search for truth. His work with Calment, done as a demographer for the French government organization Inserm (L'Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Medicale), “never had a mandate for her age,” he explains. - This was done to check the quality of the administrative documents proving her age. And there was nothing doubtful about what we had at our disposal.

He points to a continuous chain of 30 censuses - every five years until 1946, and then every seven to eight years - this chronicles the life of Jeanne Kalman in Arles.

Only one of them - the 1931 census - was perplexing. Yvonne is not listed as a resident of the family apartment in Arles, which Zach understands to be that she was already living semi-secluded in the family's country house, 10 miles from Parade Village. He claims that she will disguise herself as her mother so that Jeanne, who really suffered from tuberculosis, can avoid the social stigma of the disease. Robin has a simpler explanation: that Yvonne was at a sanatorium in Leisen.

He sarcastically speaks of Russian theory, categorically rejecting it as a "pseudoscience". But he and his co-author, Michelle Allard, have been criticized by Zach, as well as by some in the counterintelligence forum, for not being more thorough in their own endorsements. However, they conducted a series of nearly 40 interviews with Calment at the Maison du Lac, asking about details of her life that only she would know. She made several mistakes, which is not surprising for her age, often confusing father and husband. But many other details, such as the names of the maids and teachers, overlap to a large extent with information recorded in censuses and school registers.

A DNA test on Kalment's blood could settle the dispute. Jeanne Fernand's husband was a distant relative of hers, so Yvonne had more common ancestors on both sides of her family than her mother - something to be seen in her DNA.

Robin can barely contain her outrage at the thought of DNA testing. “What are we going to do, just give it to the Russians? The International Committee? So what can you do? These people are captured by magical thinking - that the secret of longevity is in her genes."

By August 2019, things were deadlocked. When the journalists spoke to Zach on Skype at his dacha, he seemed more determined than ever: “With so much resistance, I want to prove that I am right,” he says.

“Some people don't care about facts. So they just hate those who disagree with them,” he shrugs.

Gerontology was originally a hobby for Zach. He was interested in the aging process of the naked mole rat, an animal with an incredibly long lifespan of about 30 years. But he became embroiled in the affair after he contacted Valery Novoselov, the head of the gerontology department of the Moscow Society of Naturalists (MOIP), on Facebook, who had long-standing suspicions about her.

The Novoselov case was based primarily on photographic analysis; he encouraged Zach, who spoke a little French, to delve into other aspects such as biographical and archival evidence. Zach says he had no intention of posting anything - until he contacted Jean-Marie Robin about the “problems” he found.

“He always had some kind of excuse why he couldn't answer, which I thought was odd,” says Zach. "This is what made me keep going."

Zach had weighty arguments that couldn't be easily dismissed. For example, evidence that the Arles archives turned to Calment with a strange request to burn her personal papers, in 2006 a report on a lunch was published in one of the French industry newspapers, in which one of the guests hinted that Calment's insurers knew about the change of identity. but no action was taken because she was already too famous.

DNA analysis could solve everything, but this analysis seems unlikely to happen anytime soon. The Jean Dausset Foundation, a private genetic research center in Paris, refuses to even confirm that it contains Jeanne Kalman's blood; he just has a collection of bioassays that he can only use for research under anonymous conditions.