Marie-Louise Meilleur

Marie-Louise Fébronie Meilleur née Chassé (August 29, 1880 – April 16, 1998) was a French Canadian supercentenarian who, upon the death of Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, became the oldest recognized living person. Meilleur is still the oldest validated Canadian ever.

She was born in Kamouraska, Quebec, where she married her first husband, Étienne Leclerc, in 1900. After he and both of her parents died in 1911–1912, Meilleur left two of her four surviving children behind in 1913 and moved to the Ontario border. Only once, in 1939, did she return to the Quebec area.

The supercentenarian had six further children by her second husband, Hector Meilleur, whom she married in 1915. After his death in 1972, she lived first with a daughter and then in a nursing home in Corbeil.

By the time Meilleur died of a blood clot at age 117 in April 1998 in Corbeil, Ontario, one of her sons was also living in the same nursing home, and her oldest living daughter, Gabrielle Vaughan, was 90 years old. She was said to be a vegetarian as well as an avid cigarette smoker.

More than a decade after her death, Meilleur still remains one of the five oldest verified people ever recorded, and, if the highly questionable case of Shigechiyo Izumi is excluded, she ranks fourth, behind only Jeanne Calment, Sarah Knauss, and Lucy Hannah.