Old Farts

For this I'm indebted to Stephen Fry (but then, aren't we all).

Jeanne Louise Calment, born in Arles, France in 1875, attributed her remarkable longevity to the consumption and application to her skin of olive oil. On her 121st birthday she said "I only have one wrinkle
and I'm sitting on it".

Of the notary public, Andre-Francois Raffray, who purchased her apartment, promising to pay $500 per month until Jeanne died, she said "In life, one sometimes makes bad deals" By the time he died in December 1995 he had paid twice the market value of the apartment. Jeanne died in 1997.

Compared to Li Ching-Yuen, however, Jeanne Calmet was but a spring chicken when she shuffled off. Wikipedia writes: "... in 1930, Professor Wu Chung-chieh of the University of Chengdu discovered Imperial Chinese government records from 1827, congratulating one Li Ching-Yuen on his 150th birthday, and further documents later congratulating him on his 200th birthday in 1877. In 1928, a New York Times correspondent wrote that many of the old men in Li's neighborhood asserted that their grandfathers knew him when they were boys, and that he at that time was a grown man."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching-Yuen