Sick for One Hundred Years.
The celebrated Fontanelle, who, it is said, never enjoyed a well day in his life, and whose constitution was so frail that the least exposure made him ill, yet lived within less than one month of one hundred years.
M. Le Fermy, a peasant of the village of Saint-Justin, near Mont-de-Marsan, France, died in his native village September 13, 1714, aged one hundred and ten years and two months. All his life he was regarded as a feeble man. The note recording his death says:
“He was married five times, although he lived soberly and was regarded as weakly.”
In 1760, at Graessans, in the diocese of Saint-Papoul, France, died a woman whose age is recorded as one hundred and thirteen years and one month. She died of asthma, with which she had suffered for forty-five years.
The Benedictine monk, Brother N. Graillet, of the Abbey of Calvary, at La Fère, France, died in the abbey in 1763, aged one hundred and two years. He had entered the abbey in his thirtieth year, in ill-health and disappointed in life. “For seventy-two years, although always feeble, he obeyed every rule of the abbey, and was always first in filling the functions of the community,” is his record.
Pierre Foucault, a native of Abbéville, died in that place in 1766, aged one hundred and fifteen years. Up to the age of fifty his health had been very precarious, and during the years between fifty and sixty “he suffered many maladies.” After that he recovered his usual health and lived fifty-five years. His father died aged one hundred and two, and his grandfather was accidentally killed while hunting, at the age of eighty-seven.