World’s Oldest Person Recalls `A Beautiful Life’ Jeanne Calment Of France Will Be 120 On Tuesday

“God must have forgotten me,” Jeanne Calment is fond of saying. The world’s oldest living person is preparing to celebrate her 120th birthday on Tuesday.

“I’ve had a beautiful life,” she said in an interview published Thursday in the newspaper Le Figaro. “With good health, one is happy.”

“I’m still as hungry as a wolf. A 120-year-old stomach. … What says more?”

Calment, born Feb. 21, 1875, in the southwestern town of Arles, where she still lives, has outlasted her husband and her brother. Her daughter and grandson also are dead, and she has no direct descendants.

But she still has her memories.

“I’m spoiled, spoiled,” she told Le Figaro.

She remembers traveling to Paris and dining at the restaurant of the Eiffel Tower when it was still under construction. She once met Van Gogh, who worked in Arles. He died in 1890.

“Today, when I’m alone, I’m never bored because I revisit those magnificent times,” she said.

Hard of hearing and nearly blind, Calment has lived at a retirement home since 1985. She has had to use a wheelchair since fracturing her leg and elbow in a fall in 1990.

The Guinness Book of Records says she is the oldest living person whose date of birth can be reliably authenticated. She became the doyenne in 1991 with the death of a 116-year-old American, Carry White.

Calment says she has been forced to give up her two cigarettes a day and her single glass of port before meals. But she still munches on chocolate, her passion, and sleeps “like a baby.”

Arles is planning a birthday party for Calment. She says she will wear a white dress, with small touches of black.