The concept of a world without bad news – as remote as the planets visited by the Starship Enterprise – was a reality for Simone Capony, the oldest woman in France, who died in Cannes last month, aged 113 years and 186 days.

Simone Capony, almost blind and very hard of hearing, had not left her two-roomed flat in the highest part of Cannes for thirty-six years. Following a fall soon after her hundredth birthday, when she broke her collar bone, she was almost confined to a chair but remained determined not to go into a nursing home. For thirty of those thirty-six years, her neighbours Michelle and Danielle took it in turns each day to read her items of news but, worried about upsetting her, were careful to relay only positive stories, leaving out murders, wars and disasters. Simone had ‘all her wits about her’ according to her neighbours, and sometimes became suspicious that everything in the world was apparently going so well. 

Simone was born on 14 March 1894 at Charlieu in the Loire, the daughter of a doctor and one of ten children. She was engaged to a young pilot during the First World War, and after his death in 1916 at the battle of the Somme, she never married. When her father retired to Cannes in 1920, Simone became a librarian and by 1932 was in charge of the city’s library. In 1944, when the Germans took over the south of France, Simone successfully hid from them rare works of art that had been given to the library for safe keeping.

At her death, Simone had seen three different centuries and twenty-four different presidents of France, and was the fifth oldest woman in the world. The oldest woman in France is now Clémentine Veyrac-Solignac, aged 113, who was born on 7 September 1894 in a village in the Haute-Loire.

France still has the longest undisputed lifespan on record, that of Jeanne Calment, who died ten years ago at the age of 122. She was born in Arles in 1875, before the invention of the light bulb, the telephone, the aircraft and the car. As a teenager she knew Vincent Van Gogh, whom she thought rude and ugly. She outlived the lawyer who bought her flat on the basis that she could continue to live in it rent-free until she died: she was then a mere 90, and was still riding a bicycle at 100. When a reporter took his leave of her after an interview on her 115^th birthday, saying, "Until next year, perhaps," she retorted: "I don't see why not! You don't look so bad to me."