French Letter: WOW! Not all French women are reticent about revealing their age
It came as no surprise to me to learn this week that the current claimant to the title World’s Oldest Woman (WOW) is French. There were 25,961 centenarians in France at the last count, the great majority of them women.
The latest WOW, Lucile Randon, known as Sister André, was born in the southern town of Ales, not far from Nimes, on 11 February 1904, the day President Theodore Roosevelt declared that the United States was neutral in the war between Russia and Japan that had broken out earlier that week.
Today, at 118 years and 78 days (and counting), Sister André stands an excellent chance of overtaking Japan’s Kane Tanaka, a former noodle-seller, who died this month at the age of 119 years and 107 days.
Tanaka’s longevity was well known to Sister André, but closer to home was the example of Jeanne Calment, a childhood acquaintance of the artist Vincent Van Gogh, who died in 1997 aged 122 years and 164 days. Calment never had to work. She had married into a prosperous family of drapers in Arles and was looked after by servants for much of her preposterously long tenure. A keen sportswoman and hunter, who enjoyed both cigarettes and alcohol, she ended up more alert than pensioners thirty years her junior, relishing her celebrity as the oldest person ever to have lived.
In 1965, aged 90, having outlived her only daughter and grandson, she accepted an offer from the local Notaire, a Monsieur Raffray, under which, in return for Calment’s right of residence until her death plus a monthly payment of 2,500 francs, he would ultimately inherit her spacious family home. Sadly for Raffray, he died 30 years later, aged 77, with his tenant still in situ, 960,000 francs the richer. “Sometimes people make bad deals,” was Calment’s laconic response.
Lucile Randon’s life experience, thus far, has been very different. Descended from an old Huguenot family — possibly with a Cathar heritage — she converted to “the true faith” at the age of 19, taking her religious name, André, out of respect for her brother, who had expressed doubts about her new allegiance.
In 1936, already an experienced teacher and governess, who had worked for the Peugeot family in Versailles, she joined the Order of the Daughters of Charity, working among orphans and the elderly for the next 39 years.
She only has to make it through another year and 27 days to catch up and then beat the record held, albeit posthumously, by Calment, and no one is betting that she won’t succeed.
The oldest man with a certified claim to super-centenarian status was also French — Maurice Floquet, from the town of Poissons in the east of the country. As an artilleryman in the First World War, Floquet was wounded no fewer than four times, including on one occasion when his life was saved by a German soldier who removed a lump of rock that had been blasted into his throat when a grenade exploded. Floquet ended the conflict with one ear missing, a bullet lodged in his right arm and a hole in his head repaired by a nurse using cartilage from a dead comrade.
None of this prevented him from carrying on, as a tractor repairman and keen gardener, to the grand old age of 111 years and 320 days, spanning three centuries, from 1894 to 2006.
On a personal note, though once removed, my wife’s American grandmother, Edith Blair, also lived for three centuries. As the last of her family to have been born in the Blair House, on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, now the President’s principal guest house for visiting heads of state, she first saw the light of day on 6 September 1896 and lived on until 30 June 2001, just three months short of her 105th birthday.
Edith, a long-time friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was married to a US naval officer, Adolphus Staton, who won both the Medal of Honour and Navy Cross and once commanded the battleship Nevada. Asked, aged 102, what the secret was to her longevity, she replied, “regular exercise and not too much candy between meals”.
Edith Staton was a practising Episcopalian. But she would have understood the religious impulse that persuaded Lucile Randon to become Soeur André. Both would have admired the fortitude of Maurice Floquet and the astonishing staying power of Jeanne Calment.
_________________
With its Basic Instinct overtone, the Angela Rayner affair made little impact in France this week, where political sexism, though far from banished, is generally more subtly expressed than in the UK. In the Assemblée Nationale, government and opposition benches are not drawn up as if in line of battle. The chamber is a hemicycle in which all members face towards the front. When making speeches or answering questions, ministers do so from a centrally-placed lectern overlooked from behind by the assembly president and his assistants.
A male deputy caught leering at one of his female counterparts (still less gazing at pornography on his mobile phone) would be considered a cheap and vulgar fellow. But such low behaviour would, in any case, require a sly sideways glance. It could not be accomplished, as it were, head-on. There is, moreover, strength in numbers these days. Of the 577 seats in the outgoing assembly, 224 are held by women, with a higher proportion likely to emerge due to the upcoming legislative elections.
It is also the case that the French press, while preternaturally intrusive and never happier than when pointing out the failings and dalliances of the governing class, draws the line at suggestions that would more naturally find their home in the letters pages of top-shelf men’s magazines — the sort that now comes sheathed in opaque plastic coverings.
But I will leave the last word to Cécile Ducourtieux, London Correspondent of Le Monde, an accomplished observer of the Westminster circus.
An article in the Mail on Sunday with a photograph of Labour’s deputy leader, “with her long red hair, black tights and crossed legs,” was shown next to an image of Sharon Stone from the film Basic Instinct that had transformed the American actress into an icon.
Ducourtieux’s verdict? The story was “grotesque,” and a perfect illustration of the “misogyny and poverty of debate in certain British tabloids”. And who is to say she is wrong?