THENEWYORKER,FEBRUARY 17 &24, 2020 69
greeted me in a domed entryway lined
with murals of wildlife, and we pro-
ceeded through a series of faded cor-
ridors—past a mastodon skeleton and
a glass case emptied of all but a set of
doilies—before arriving in a dusty
classroom, where we sat down at a
long wooden table. We were joined
by two of his colleagues from the So-
ciety of Naturalists, and I had brought
an interpreter. Novoselov had a bois-
terous, orotund way of talking that
even the interpreter seemed to have
trouble making sense of. After a dis-
course on his research into the cause
of Lenin’s death, Novoselov turned to
Jeanne Calment. “This was taken in
1955, so she was past eighty here,” he
said, pulling up a photograph of
Calment on his laptop. “The woman
is still full of estrogen—she is just en-
tering the early stages of menopause.
It’s clear that, hormonally, she is still
a woman.”
Novoselov remained certain that
Calment couldn’t have been a hun-
dred and twenty-two years old, but
he was now agnostic about the pos-
sibility of a switch. He felt that Zak,
as a non-scientist, had been too hasty
in publishing some of his work. “We
are the people of the Soviet Union,
Zak is a person from Russia,” No-
voselov said, at one point. “We are
analog people, he is a digital person.”
I asked Novoselov why, given his be-
lief in the importance of scientific
method, he was willing to rely so heav-
ily on photographs, which are noto-
riously open to interpretation. He
started talking about the youthful look
of Calment’s legs. At one point, he
said that he had asked specialists at
the Investigative Committee, Russia’s
equivalent of the F.B.I., to perform a
forensic analysis of some photographs.
He had a letter from the committee,
which I did not read until later. It
stated that “the quality of the photos
you submitted of Jeanne Calment and
her daughter... does not meet the
requirements for forensic portrait
examination.”
It felt like we weren’t getting any-
where. One of the most compelling
points of the case mounted by No-
voselov and Zak, it had always seemed
to me, was that the collective assump-
tions of a society can suppress unlikely
truths. Every time I found myself con-
vinced that their accusations were im-
possibly far-fetched, I wondered
whether I wasn’t just being compla-
cent: who would have believed, for in-
stance, that Jack Nicholson’s sister was
actually his mother, before Time sprang
the news on him, in 1974?
“How old do you think I am?” I
asked Novoselov.
“Seventeen,” he said.
“Seriously, how old do you think I
am? This is one of your methods, look-
ing at someone and estimating their
age. Write it down.”
Novoselov obfuscated, but eventu-
ally I persuaded him, along with each
of his colleagues, to jot down on a slip
of paper the age that he perceived me
to be. One of them wrote twenty-eight
and another thirty-five. Novoselov’s
guess was forty-two. I am thirty-nine.I
t’s hard to find a smoking gun if
there hasn’t been a crime. As time
went by, I grew increasingly convinced
of the veracity of Jeanne Calment’s
record, but several loose ends trou-
bled me. I wanted to know more aboutthe claim, in the book about the in-
surance industry, that an insurer and
French authorities had turned a blind
eye to fraud. The source, it turned out,
was a former employee of the French
treasury, who did not want to be named.
An insurance company had acquired
the annuity (the rente viagère) on
Jeanne Calment’s apartment some-
time in the sixties. According to the
source, officials at the company no-
ticed that Calment was an actuarial
outlier and inquired with the treasury
about the account. The source’s su-
periors signalled that he should back
off. Later, after Calment’s death, one
of the insurance-company officials
told him that she had switched places
with her daughter. The official died
in the two-thousands, and, along with
him, the origin of the tale.
Months after my first conversation
with Michel Allard, I e-mailed him
to see if, by chance, he’d unearthed
the taped interviews with Calment.
“You’ve come at just the right time,”
he replied. He’d got them out of his
basement and, he said, was about to
take them to be digitized. He agreed