For me one of the strongest bit against this is that her daughter would have had to pull the wool over everyone in their towns eyes, or they would have had to have been in on it too.
After the mother's death, she keeps going about her life as usual, goes by her original name, does all the normal things she did before. On official documents she lists her mother's name but around friends or neighbours goes by whatever they want to call her. Maybe a lot of the neighbours know what's going on, but hey, we all want to avoid taxes, right? So it goes.
And gradually she starts going by the other name instead. People nod and understand if she corrects them. And eventually everyone around her that might prove otherwise dies off, moves away, or loses contact. Decades go by. Soon everyone remembers that older spritely woman who's always been around here.
Any photos or evidence that might prove her story false, well they go missing. The ones that confirm it stick around.
you still have the problem to fool the official at death time. Making people believe that the mother's body was the body of the daughter. Death certificate were not signed out of nowhere even in 1934.
There is a picture of her on wikipedia when she was 70 in 1945, she doesn't look like a 47 years old person, by any metrics.
> Death certificate were not signed out of nowhere even in 1934.
Actually, the curious thing in this case is it kind of was:
"Curiously, her death certificate was issued on the basis of testimony of a sole witness, a 71-year-old unemployed woman (i.e. not a doctor or nurse) who “saw her dead”"
In France at the time (and maybe now?) there was no inheritance tax between spouses, but there is otherwise. The theory is that the father sees that his wife is dead and knows he only has so many years, but doesn't want to give the tax man any of his money. So they say "ah no, this is my daughter who has died- my wife is right here beside me". Then when he dies, well it's a spouse inheritance to his "wife".
The time between the first Calment death and Calment becoming notable is long enough - over 50 years - that it's plausible that people who were in on the scam/aware of the assumption of the mother's identity had already died. Especially since ww2 happened in the interim
Raffray is the biggest sticking point in this fwiw - he had time and incentive to debunk Calment's age, and had some preexisting relationship with her before they entered their contract.
There is little evidence that she ever spent much time at her official address. Living in remote villas, as she mostly did, and simply going by "Madame Calment", as she apparently also mostly did, few would have paid attention to her given name or any discrepancy between that and official records.
When her extraordinary claims of old age became famous many decades later, well, have you ever seen family members arguing what really happened many decades ago? Doubts would have been hard to sustain.
Well, either something like that happened... or she won a lottery with a 10 billion to 1 chance. My money is on the former. I've read enough stories about people assuming false identities to understand there's a number of ways to pull something like that off.
Whoa, watch out for a very common statistical error. For any particular property with a 10 billion to 1 chance, the probability that it applies to someone living is quite high. If you have a group of properties, each with an independent 10 billion to 1 chance, the probability that someone living has one of these properties is very high indeed.
The fallacy of thinking that winning a lottery is rare is common and has horrible effects like sending innocent people to jail on a regularly basis. For example, if you search Clearview AI for someone who is a 99.99% match for a surveillance picture of someone committing a crime, you should expect tens of thousands of matches. If the AI really did its job, it would return many hits along with a prominent warning that, with very high probability, any given one of these people did not commit a crime!
And, of course, someone always wins the lottery, since that’s the whole point.
>> Sir Roy Meadow, who testified that the chance of two children from an affluent family suffering SIDS was 1 in 73 million. He had arrived at this figure by squaring his estimate of a chance of 1 in 8500 of an individual SIDS death in similar circumstances. The Royal Statistical Society later issued a statement arguing that there was no statistical basis for Meadow's claim, and expressed concern at the "misuse of statistics in the courts".[3]
Why are you talking to me like I'm ignorant about statistics? I'm not the guy sending innocent people to jail on a 99.99% match.
Give me a plausible and ordinary way to cheat the lotto and I guarantee you there will be a lot of cheats. But I don't know of any plausible way to cheat the lotto.
Also, yes, the probability that at least one person on earth was the 10 billion to 1 chance is high, but that doesn't mean the chances of her being that person is high. There's simply too much "fog of war" in her past, such as the "daughter" dying of tuberculosis at a convenient time.
How easy is it to win a world particular world record by such a commanding margin past a cluster of runners-up? Easier than pulling the wool over a town's worth of people's eyes?
Usain Bolt and Magnus Carlsen have both better than #2 by more than the gap between #2 and #10. Of course, there are allegations that Bolt may not be competing fairly.
