44

Civil status records discovered in 2015 indicated that Marie Laure du Serre Telmon had died in 1977, at the unprecedented age of 117. During a five-year investigation, many documents were gathered on the life of “Laure” and her family in order to verify her longevity. This investigation concluded that Laure’s identity had unintentionally and posthumously been adopted by her sister, Octavie, which explains the existence of a second death certificate under Laure’s name. The confusion around their identities was linked to Octavie’s tendency to round down her age in order to make herself younger, combined with a set of circumstances concerning a very particular geographical and administrative context. Indeed, it was first shown that Laure, baptized in Venezuela in 1860, was living in Paris in 1907 when she divorced. Then, thanks to the registers of the Charles-Foix Hospital in Ivry-sur-Seine, the conclusion was drawn that it was Octavie, born in French Guiana and aged 103, who had died instead of Laure in 1977, initially under the name of “Maria Dussère,” aged “99.” As for Laure’s destiny, her trail was picked up in Paris in 1916: she had lived there with her sisters and her younger son Henri Cor, eventually dying in Montmorency in 1948, at the age of 88.