“A few tufts of grisly hair, two squinting eyes, lost in the multitude of wrinkles and hanging folds of skin that stood for nose and cheeks, and with a head in perpetual oscillation.”
She lived in the open air, strolling from point to point in all sorts of wind and weather. She enjoyed an income amounting to about one thousand dollars, and some of her friends made her a proposition to transfer their property to her providing she would pay them a certain annuity and devise the property back to them at her death.
The bargain was made, and faithfully kept, as far as the annuity was concerned, yet so skilfully did she manage affairs that she soon had an income of two thousand dollars over and above all expenditures. Her friends meanwhile imagined that they had made a good bargain, as her physician had assured them that she “could never see the return of the swallows next spring.”
The swallows came and went, and came and went again, and they got impatient, and in some way the “old mamselle” found it out. Then she set herself to live in earnest. She wept for Louis XVI, lived through and detested the Revolution, saw the funerals of Bonaparte and Charles X, and lived through the barricades of 1830.
Finally, in 1835, she died, aged one hundred and five years, lacking part of a month. On making an inventory of her affairs her executor found upward of four hundred linen chemises, each made with her own hands, not one of which had ever been worn. Her revenue, at the time of her death, was two hundred thousand dollars.
The people who made the bargain had died one after another, the last one more than forty years before her demise.
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.”