Remarkable Centenarians.
In 1699 the Mémoires of the Academy of Sciences recorded the death of a man, aged one hundred years, whose spinal column consisted of one single bone, the intermediate cartilages having ossified.
About the middle of the seventeenth century there was carried in solemn procession and hung up before the shrine of Notre Dame de Liesse an enormous vesical calculus, on which was engraved the following legend:
“This stone was removed from François Annibal d’Etrées, duke and peer, Grand Marshal of France, by the grace of God through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin, September 15, 1654.”
The grand marshal was eighty-two years old when the terrible operation was performed. It gave him a new lease of life, as he did not die until 1675, more than twenty years afterward, aged one hundred and two years and a few months.
A poor girl, daughter of a retainer of the Château de Colemberg, near Boulogne, named Nicole Mare, was born deformed, and, besides having a withered forearm, was so humpbacked that she stood less than four feet high. With all this, she lived to the age of one hundred and ten years. Her occupation was herding cattle, and it is said that the only food she ever tasted was bread and milk.