Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman

Woman of pride, passion, and labor, who was actress of her time because she had the ambition of her means and the means of her ambition, actress of ours, finally, since between Marie and atomic force, the filiation is direct.

Besides, she died of it.

From birth, Marie possesses the three dispositions that make brilliant subjects, cherished by professors: memory, power of concentration, and appetite for learning.

“My heart breaks when I think of my spoiled aptitudes which, all the same, had to be worth something…”

Then what? The “ordinary destiny of women”? She never imagined making it her own.

But in the chalet of Zakopane where she lingers, alone, in September 1891, walking her melancholy under the great black pines of the Carpathians, dragging a grippe that does not finish, one man, Casimir, could take her away. And a part of herself hopes.

In two months she will be twenty-four years.

She is poor. She is not yet beautiful. For all diploma she has the Polish baccalaureate. Why would she become “someone”? Besides, she loves Casimir, and waits for him.

Four years have not cooled the sentiments of the young man, probably exalted on the contrary by the obstacle…And he has lost nothing of his charm…

What he does not know, when he mentions their shared future, is that he now has a rival. And what a rival! A laboratory.

Where does she come from, this nervous young woman, who curiously combines timidity and assurance? It is a daughter of the earth, who has need of air, space, trees. She entertains with nature a relationship that is almost carnal. The plants know it and under her fingers blossom.

What she denies, on the other hand, is her animal part. Her brief angers, for example, which betray like a bolt of lightning what she is controlling in the way of concealed storms.

Now, however, her father is deprived of his attributions, loses the lodging that accompanies them and half of his appointments.

How to join the two ends?

He gnaws at himself. Ah!

What afflicts her is not that she has only one dress which must be made over by a seamstress but that she does not see any way out of the tunnel in which she is engaged.

Then she is rescued by her sister.

French science, whose milk Marie Sklodowska has come to Paris to suck, happily has one great man, Pasteur, who is reaching the end of his life.

In Paris, she will spend her leisure time with her sister Bronia and Bronia’s own Casimir. Though they work hard they know how to amuse themselves, with Slavic hospitality. There are infinite discussions around the samovar and the piano in which they remake the world.

They organize parties, put on amateur spectacles, tableaux vivants: a young woman draped in a garnet tunic, her blond hair falling over her shoulders, incarnates Poland breaking its bonds while Paderewski plays Chopin in the wings: it’s Marie, proud of having been chosen.

But chatting pleasantly will never be her specialty.

Her austerity sometimes borders on masochism. One night she is so cold in her fireless little room that she piles on her bed everything contained in her trunk along with a chair, while the water freezes in her basin.

She sometimes faints from having fed herself exclusively on radishes and tea. Bronia and Casimir rescue her and a cure of beefsteak puts her to rights.

A summer passes. She perfects her French. When classes resume, she has driven out all the “Polishisms” from her vocabulary. Only the gently rolled r’s will bear witness until her last day to her Slavic origins, adding a certain charm to her voice which does not lack it already. And, like all the world, she will always calculate in her mother tongue.

Not only does she pass her exam, but when the results are announced before all the candidates in order of merit, her name is spoken first. Marie Sklodowska is licensed in physical sciences by the University of Paris. And it is admirable.

Did she even notice, on the eve of her exam, that Sadi Carnot, the President of the Republic, was stabbed in his carriage by an Italian militant anarchist?

Perhaps she did not speak of it, even for an instant, with the physicist she has been seeing for several weeks, and who, as others offer chocolates, has brought her, when he has come to chat with her in her room, the offprint of an article titled “On symmetry in physical phenomena, the symmetry of an electric field and a magnetic field.” The brochure is dedicated “To Mlle Sklodowska with the respect and the friendship of the author P. Curie.”

Together they speak enormously, but about physics or themselves.

And, everyone knows, to tolerate a person telling you about his childhood it is necessary to be in love with him.

Marie has not attained twenty-six years, soon twenty-seven, she has not lived three years in Paris without having met at Bronia’s, at the Faculty, at the laboratory, representatives of the male species sensitive to her attractions. An enamored Polish student had once thought to swallow laudanum to make himself interesting in her eyes. Marie’s reaction: “That young man has no sense of priorities.”

In any case, they did not have the same.

Pierre Curie has come on stage in Marie’s life at the precise moment at which it was suitable that he should appear.

The year 1894 has begun. Marie is assured of obtaining her license in July. She is beginning to look beyond, she is more available, and the spring is beautiful. Pierre is already captive to this singular little blond person.

It is clear that, making his way at once through the realms of the sublime and of theoretical physics, Pierre still finds himself alone at thirty-five years. And Marie Sklodowska very quickly appears to him as the Unique, capable of accompanying him there.

But lofty thinking is ill compensated. At thirty-six years, Pierre Curie earns thirty-six hundred francs per year at the School of Physics.

Marie Curie is over fifty years when she writes lines that describs their first meeting and she is never a woman to express herself, publicly at least, like the Portuguese Nun. But under the convention of the style and the eternal constraint certainly appears a little of what was, it seems, a reciprocal bolt of lightning.

Marie will be perceptibly longer in being convinced that she must alienate her independence, even to this physicist with limpid eyes.

Pierre Curie has said it to her: “Science, is your destiny.” Science, that is to say research pursued for practical ends.

Marie tells, in the stilted book she devotes to him: “Pierre Curie wrote me during the summer of 1894 letters which I think admirable taken as a whole.”

To one, Pierre adds a postscript: “I have shown your photograph to my brother. Was I wrong? He finds you very good. He says: ‘She has a look that is very decided and even stubborn.’”

Stubborn, oh how much!

She, always dressed in gray, gentle yet stern, child-like yet mature, sweet yet uncompromising…the woman from Poland.

He…

And then they…

The only competition that Pierre has ever accepted and that he has just won, is against Poland.

And thus it is in July 1894 that Marie takes, on the sly, lessons of a new kind with Bronia: how does one make a roast chicken? Fries? How does one feed a husband?

We know, on the other hand, that a cousin has the good idea of sending a check as a wedding present. That the check is exchanged for two bicycles. And that the “little queen,” the entirely new invention that became the darling of the French, will be the honeymoon vehicle of M. and Mme Pierre Curie.

The bicycle, is freedom.

To extract uranium from pitchblende, there are at that time factories. To extract radium from it, there is a woman in a hangar.

She is sure of her method. But her means are derisory.

Marie gives birth to a daughter, yet does not take time off from work. Why are they so tired, the Curies, when they arrive, with Irene who is cutting her seventh tooth, at Auroux where they have rented a house for the summer?

They struggle to swim in the river and they struggle on their bicycles. And Marie has the tips of her fingers chapped, painful. She does not know, nor Pierre either, that they are beginning to suffer from the irradiation of the radioactive substances they are manipulating.

It is in the following December, on a page of the black notebook not precisely dated and bearing Pierre’s writing, that appears for the first time the word radium.

What remains is to prove the existence of the new element. “I would like it to have a beautiful color,” says Pierre.

Pure salts of radium are colorless, quite simply. But their own radiations color with a blue-mauve tint the glass tubes that contain them. In sufficient quantity, their radiations provoke a visible glow in the darkness.

When that glow begins to irradiate in the darkness of the laboratory, Pierre is happy.

Marie makes jams and the clothes of her daughters out of a spirit of thrift. Not from zeal.

When it comes to mathematics, he judges her stronger than he and says it good and loud. She, for her part, admires in her companion “the sureness and the rigor of his reasonings, the surprising suppleness with which he can change the object of his research…”

Each of them has a very high idea of the value of the other.

An aura has been created that attracts and impresses at the same time. The echo of their works, the radiance of Pierre, the intensity of Marie, that force which is all the more moving because the young blond woman appears more and more slender under her black smock, the couple they form, the almost religious spirit of their scientific engagement, their asceticism, all this has attracted young researchers in their wake.

A dishevelled chemist, André Debierne, will enter the life of the Curies never to leave it again.

Marie Curie is neither a saint nor a martyr. She is young at a time when most women oscillate between remorse and hysteria, either guilty or “out of their bodies.”

In fact, two German researchers announce that radioactive substances have physiological effects. Pierre immediately exposes his arm deliberately to a source of radium. With happiness, he sees a lesion form.

To be recognized by their peers — the Curies certainly appreciate that satisfaction. Besides, it is “fair.”

Now, it happens that at night she gets up and starts to wander through the sleeping house. Little crises of somnambulism that alarm Pierre. Or it is he who is ravaged by pains that alter his sleep. Marie watches over him, worried, powerless.

And her appearance? Marie is sitting next to Lord Kelvin, in her “formal dress.” She has only one, still the same after ten years, black, with a discreet neckline. In truth, it is better that she has no love of toilette, because she has no taste at all and never will have. Black — which distinguishes her, because it is not customary to wear it — and gray to which she has subscribed out of convenience, settle matters well and make a good setting for her ash-blond hair.

There exists a threshold beyond which disdain for honors borders on affectation, and one would be tempted to think that Marie Curie has crossed it when she complains, in sum, at having received, with Pierre, the Nobel Prize.

Wrested from their bowl, our two goldfish suffocate and thrash about. No, they wish no banquet; no, they wish no tour of America; no, they do not wish to visit the Automobile Show.

However, they are both unconditional admirers of Wagner.

He takes the train back from the country Monday evening, carrying a bouquet of ranunculus.

Marie returns Wednesday evening. The rain has resumed in Paris.

The next day, Thursday, Pierre is on his way from his publisher, Gauthier-Villars, to the Institute. The rain has started again. He opens his umbrella. The Rue Dauphine is narrow, congested, he crosses behind a fiacre…

As always, he is absent-minded…Approaching the fiacre in the opposite direction, the driver of a wagon with two horses, coming from the quays and going up the Rue Dauphine, sees appear before his left horse a man in black, an umbrella…The man totters, he tries to seize the horse’s harness…Hampered by his umbrella, he has slipped between the two horses which their driver has attempted with all his strength to hold back. But the weight of the heavy wagon, five meters long and loaded with military equipment, drags him forward. It is the back left wheel that crushes Pierre’s skull. And now that famous brain, that beloved brain, seeps out on the wet cobblestones…

The body is removed to a police station. An officer picks up his telephone. But Pierre Curie no longer has ears to be annoyed that he belongs, in death as in life, to the number of those for whom one disturbs the Minister of the Interior.

Marie remains frozen; then she says: “Pierre is dead? Completely dead?”

Yes, Pierre was completely dead.

Telegrams flow in, from all corners of the world, letters pile up, the condolences are royal, republican, scientific, formal, or simply emotional and sincere. Fame and love have been brutally mown down by death…

A new title, a sinister one, is added to those with which Marie has up to then been dubbed. Henceforth she will be called only “the illustrious widow.”

Eleven years — that is long. Long enough so that the roots of love, if the tree is robust, plunge so deep that they will subsist always, even dried up.

She begins to write to Pierre, a sort of laboratory notebook of grief.

“My Pierre, I arise after having slept fairly well, relatively calm. There is scarcely a quarter of an hour of that and here I again want to howl like a wild beast.”

Summer is here and the sun, so wounding when in oneself everything is black…

“I spend all my days in the laboratory. I can no longer conceive of anything that can give me personal joy, except perhaps scientific work — but no, because if I were successful, I could not tolerate that you should not know it.”

She will be successful. And she will tolerate. Because that is the law of life.

As she gives her first lecture, continuing where Pierre left off, something is happening that clouds the eyes, tightens the throats, holds the audience from top to bottom of the tiers of seats frozen with emotion before that little black silhouette.

It was fifteen years ago, to the day, that, arriving from Warsaw, a little Polish student crossed for the first time the courtyard of the Sorbonne. The second life of Marie Curie has begun.

And the chronicler of the Journal: “A great victory for feminism…For if woman is admitted to give higher instruction to students of both sexes, where henceforth will be the so-called superiority of the male man? In truth, I tell you: the time is close when women will become human beings.”

Marie is the only one to be able to do it. All haloed with that melancholy fame that she bears so soberly, she has touched one heart in particular by the simplicity of her bearing and the precision of the objectives she has fixed for herself: that of Andrew Carnegie.

He decides to finance her research, which he knows how to do with elegance.

In the eyes of the international scientific community, she has become an implacable person, without rival in the domain in which she is an authority, a unique star, because she is a woman, in the constellation that then shines in the sky of science.

Yet “her nerves are ill,” as she has been told by some of the doctors participating in the congress. Nerves are never ill. They only say that in some part one is ill.

But in 1910, no one knows that a certain Doctor Freud has already analyzed Dora.

A trip to the Engadine will succeed in restoring her.

Many years will pass before her daughters are old enough so that she can speak with them about what is occupying her days. If she never speaks to them of their father, whose name she has forbidden one to pronounce in her presence, it is that fresh wounds are so prompt to bleed, and since when does one bleed in front of one’s children?

To say nothing in order to be sure of controlling herself is her rule, she applies it. This does not facilitate communication.

But she has known the privilege of privileges: coherence.

At the end of the same year, 1911, it is the jury of the Swedish Academy that gives itself the pleasure of bestowing on her the Nobel Prize. In chemistry this time, and not shared.

But the news reaches her in the heart of a tempest next to which the academic eddies are a spring shower. In a word, due to her association with a certain married man, Langevin, Mme Curie has for a time ceased to be an honorable woman.

Nor at work are things always smooth. There is a day, for instance, when the laboratory’s head of works is raining blows on the woman’s door and yelling:

“Camel! Camel!”

No doubt she can be.

She is capable of everything.

Thanks to Marthe Klein who has taken her there, she discovers the South of France, its splendor, its August nights in which one sleeps on the terrace, the warmth of the Mediterranean where she begins to swim again. Tourists are rare. Only, on the beach, a few English…

The passion for stones is the only one she is known to have where ownership is concerned, but this passion is lively: she will also buy a house in Brittany.

She is still slight, slender, supple, walks with bare legs, in espadrilles, with the manner of a young girl. According to the days, she carries ten years more or ten years less than her age.

For some time she has needed glasses, but what could be more natural?

The courage, the determination, the assurance that made her the twice-crowned queen of radioactivity are powerless before the evidence: Paris is a festival, but French science is anemic. Toward whom, toward what, should she turn?

Those who are most dynamic among the scientists will try to sound the alarm, everywhere, with voice and with pen: whether it be prestige, industrial competition, or social progress, a nation that does not invest in research is a nation that declines.

This, everyone knows more or less — rather less than more — today.

And so, one May morning in 1920, Marie welcomes at her office at the Curie Pavillion Henri-Pierre Roché who accompanies a very little graying person with large black eyes, slightly limping: Mrs. Meloney Mattingley, whom her friends call Missy. The minuscule Missy is editor of a feminine magazine of good reputation.

And the unforeseeable is going to happen. One of those mysterious consonances, as frank as a C Major chord. A friendship, whose consequences will be infinite.

Marie is charming, though who knows why, with this bizarre little creature.

Mme Curie is, in a word, poor. In a poor country.

Stupefying! Something to surprise the cottages lining 5th Avenue, certainly.

Missy has a good nature. She loves to admire, and Marie seems to her admirable. This excellent disposition being accompanied by a vigorous practical sense, Missy, who compares herself to a locomotive, moves a series of railway cars if not mountains.

How much does a gram of radium cost? One million francs, or one hundred thousand dollars. One hundred thousand dollars for a noble cause attached to a grand name — this can be found. Missy believes she can collect it from several very rich compatriots.

She mobilizes the wife of the king of petrol, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, that of the Vice and future President, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, and several other ladies of the same caliber.

She takes each bull by the horns — that is, each editor of each New York newspaper by his sentiments.

Evidently, when Missy will have succeeded, Marie will have to come in person to get her gram of radium. In a parallel way, a well-launched autobiography can bring her substantial authors’ rights. What benefit will Missy draw personally from the operation? Purely moral.

Correct? Unquestionably.

What remains of their correspondence, which is, at times, almost daily, attests to the permanence of the affection that binds these two warriors, equally lame, equally intrepid.

If anyone esteems herself at her true price, it is Marie. If anyone is prepared to pay it, it is Missy. But take care: on both sides, one must be “regular.”

Marie has promised to come get her gram of radium herself. Does she confirm? She confirms. To write her autobiography. Does she confirm? She confirms. Good.

The king and queen of Belgium remained six weeks, says Missy. The queen of radium cannot make a less royal visit.

She writes to Bronia: “My eyes are very weakened and probably not much can be done for them. As for my ears, an almost continual buzzing, often very intense, persecutes me. I worry about it very much: my work may be hampered — or even become impossible. Perhaps radium has something to do with my troubles, but one can’t declare it with certainty.” Radium guilty? It’s the first time that she mentions the idea. She will soon have confirmation that she is suffering from a double cataract.

Mme Curie is to receive from the hands of the President of the United States the miraculous product of a national collection, one gram of radium.

She shakes hands with a great many people until someone breaks her wrist.

That evening, Missy knows definitively who Marie really is. And reciprocally.

Fabulous razzia: Marie has pocketed in addition fifty thousand dollars advance for her autobiography, though the book is to be insipid. Missy has at every point kept her promises, and well beyond.

The crystalline lenses of the beautiful ash-gray eyes are becoming each day more opaque. She is convinced she will soon be blind. Marie and Missy embrace each other crying.

Let us say right away, however, that these two slender dying creatures will nevertheless meet again. It will be seven years later, again at the White House…

Missy and Marie certainly belong to the same race. That of the irreducibles.

And now the red curls of Perrin, discoverer of Brownian motion, have become white.

These conferences to which she travels often weigh on her. She finds only one pleasure in them: still a devotee of excursions, she vanishes and goes off to discover a few of the splendors of the Earth. For over fifty years a recluse, she saw almost nothing.

From everywhere, she writes and describes to her daughters. The Southern Cross is “a very beautiful constellation.” The Escurial is “very impressive”…The Arab palaces of Grenada are “very lovely”…The Danube is bordered with hills. But the Vistula…Ah! The Vistula! With its most adorable banks of sand, etc. etc.

One afternoon in May 1934, at the laboratory where she has tried to come and work, Marie murmurs: “I have a fever, I’m going home…”

She walks around the garden, examines a rosebush which she herself has planted and which does not look well, asks that it be taken care of immediately…She will not return.

What is wrong with her? Apparently nothing. Yet she has no strength, she is feverish. She is transported to a clinic, then to a sanatorium in the mountains. The fever does not subside. Her lungs are intact. But her temperature rises. She has attained that moment of grace where even Marie Curie no longer wants to see the truth. And the truth is that she is dying.

She will have a last smile of joy when, consulting for the last time the thermometer she is holding in her little hand, she observes that her temperature has suddenly dropped. But she no longer has the strength to make a note of it, she from whom a number has never escaped being written down. This drop in temperature is the one that announces the end.

And when the doctor comes to give her a shot:

“I don’t want it. I want to be left in peace.”

It will require another sixteen hours for the heart to cease beating, of this woman who does not want, no, does not want to die. She is sixty-six years old.

Marie Curie-Sklodowska has ended her course.

On her coffin when it has descended into the grave, Bronia and their brother Jozef throw a handful of earth. Earth of Poland.

Thus ends the story of an honorable woman.

Marie, we salute you…

She was of those who work one single furrow.

Nevertheless, the quasi-totality of physicists and mathematicians will refuse fiercely and for a long time to open what Lamprin will call “a new window on eternity.”