> Although the amount Mr. Raffray already paid is more than twice the apartment's current market value, his widow is obligated to keep sending that monthly check. If Mrs. Calment outlives her, too, then the Raffray children and grandchildren will have to pay.
It is very legal and common in France. The overall payment is calculated according to the age of the seller on a scale set down by French law.
It isn't really a purchase or deed contract. It is an agreement between two estates. The property becomes an inheritance so that is why it persists generations. I think that is the best way to explain it anyway.
Then I don't know why the author didn't just say "his family will have to continue paying out of his estate". I suspect that kind of obligation is very legal and common in most of Europe and North America (and probably elsewhere): if someone dies, their debts and contracts are settled against their estate.
The way it's written, it sounds like the family was legally obligated to keep paying until Calment's death, even if the estate ran dry.
The Bible mentions punishments continued to the children, and in some cases up to 10 generations from the person who committed it.
A typical passage might say, "Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me".
I think King David was only allowed to be king because he was the first generation in 10 after such an incident.
I don't know if Israel today still has any crimes that punish the family. It also wouldn't matter for a civil agreement like this.
However, in ancient Israel everyone's debts and land were forfeited every 7 and 49 years, so real estate would be priced according to how far the country was from a reset. That would certainly affect a similar agreement.
When I said "hard to see how that would be legal", I meant it with regard to modern legal systems, not semi-fictional bronze age legal systems where people can be stoned to death for innocuous things.
If you're looking for a modern example, I think North Korea has a 'three generations of punishment' program. You and your family get sentenced to a labor camp, and if your children are born there they stay there too.
It seems most impractical to levy any sort of punishment for ten generations. In the event the family survives that long, the entity charged with punishing them probably won't.
I don't know French law, but it likely is that you cannot cherrypick an inheritance; you either accept all the possessions and all the debts of the deceased, or you accept neither (sometimes with some exceptions as in it being legal to immediately cancel renting agreements for houses. Memberships of sporting clubs typically also automatically end at death)
That would mean the children and grandchildren need not pay, but if they don't want to, they wouldn't be able to inherit anything else from the deceased.
Also, for the widow, it will depends on marital law. In some countries, without prenuptial agreements, at marriage, all possessions and debts of each of the people marrying become shared, and any agreement either of the couple reaches with a third party become one with the couple.
Finally, anybody inheriting this would be stupid not to accept the 'burden'. The money already paid is a sunk cost, so it should be ignored, and the expected amount yet to pay would be small compared to the expected gain (see it as a $500 lottery with a >$100,000 payout, at odds of better than 1:100)
This sort of thing is (in the UK) legal for some timeshares. The common case is your parents buy a timeshare apartment which has a stiff annual maintenance fee. You might not even know about this. When they die, you inherit the property and are on the hook for the maintenance fee. It's usually complicated by the fact that timeshares are easy to buy but very difficult to sell.
Hard to see how that would be legal.