Informant38

Ms Nigot killed herself last Tuesday, two weeks after the death of a healthy couple in their late 80s, each of whom could not face the prospect of outliving the other.

After attending three workshops with Dr Nitschke, Syd and Marjorie Croft took a drug overdose at a retirement village at Bundaberg in south-east Queensland.

Ms Nigot's death has triggered a police coronial investigation which will examine how she died and whether anyone assisted her death. But she said she took an overdose of medication which she had bought in the United States.

In a note to Dr Nitschke, thanking him for his support, she described him as a crusader working for a worthwhile humane cause.

However, the West Australian Health Minister, Bob Kucera, expressed anger. "It is one thing for Dr Nitschke to be supporting people who have terminal illness and whose quality of life has reached rock bottom. It's quite another to be talking about cases where there is no apparent physical problem ... we know of many people who are living highly fulfilling lives well into their 80s and 90s."

Ms Nigot, who moved to Australia in 1967, was awarded the highest French academic award, the Office of the Palmes Academiques, in 1995, eight years after retiring from the Department of French Studies at the University of Western Australia.

An atheist, she wrote in her final statement: "The life of an individual, voluntarily terminated, is of small importance compared with the death statistics relative to crime, accident, war and other similar causes of human demise which are viewed by society as a whole with regret, but accepted with relative equanimity.

"Why is there pressure against helping or allowing people who have had enough of living ... to fulfil the longing for final peace?"

She led what she described as three lives - in France, the United States and Australia. After World War II, she was promotions manager of the exclusive Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and met the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the then French president, Charles de Gaulle, Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Dali.

She asked to be cremated - no speeches, no mention of God.