Marie Curie (7 page)

The sudden death of her husband at age forty-nine was a horrific blow, the loss of her best friend, soul mate, the source of her serenity, the devoted father of her two daughters, and her only real peer in science. She described her feeling as “wanting to scream like a savage beast.”

But she didn’t scream. Not out loud. Nor did she talk about him; around the children she never allowed his name to be spoken. In a way today’s child psychologists wouldn’t applaud, she assumed that erasing Pierre would enable baby Ève and nine-year-old Irène to get over their father’s death more quickly. We don’t know whether Marie ever read Freud and his theories about the negative consequences of repressing feelings, but from her actions it seems unlikely. Not only was Pierre gone, she now became her most remote as a mother, leaving it to the children’s grandfather to provide emotional comfort. She did start a new notebook, of tan canvas, a journal addressing Pierre as if he were still alive, hoping against hope that communication was still possible: “I live only for your memory and to make you proud of me.” She was comforted that maybe “an accumulation of energy” had come from his casket toward her during the funeral.

Although there were moments when she forgot the pain, for a long time afterward she would be overtaken by “the feeling of obsessive distress.” As always, she dealt with a black depression by escaping into work. Three days after the accident, she was back in the lab, starting another new notebook of experiments, refining work of Pierre’s. “I no longer know what joy is or even pleasure,” she wrote in her mourning notebook. “I will never be able to laugh genuinely until the end of my days.”

When the French government offered her a pension, she refused it, basically saying, “I am thirty-nine and able to support myself, thank you very much.” No longer part of a team, she was still a scientist in her own right. An increasingly respected one. It was a turning point, going from a duo to a solo.

She devoted all her energy to continuing alone the work they had undertaken together. In her mourning notebook she confessed her motivation came from “the desire to prove to the world, and above all to myself, that that which you loved so much has some real value.”

She proved it in grand style in 1909, when the University of Paris and the Pasteur Institute decided to join forces to build her a large laboratory from scratch. She had always loved Louis Pasteur’s reference to labs as “sacred places” where “humanity grows, fortifies itself, and becomes better.” Now she would have a sacred place of her own. Marie involved herself in every detail of her new Radium Institute, to be erected a few streets away from the now-famous “shed.”

She was also hard at work on her exhaustive summary of radioactivity, which was eventually published in 1910. The two-volume
Treatise on Radioactivity
provided others with a clear, useful history. That same year, she finally succeeded in isolating radium in its purest form yet.

She kept up with the ongoing research of others. Unlike Mendeleyev, she changed with the times. The temperamental Russian chemist had kept on revising his table of elements until his death in 1907, but he’d fallen out of the mainstream, refusing to recognize the existence of radioactivity or the electron or other new discoveries.

Marie was impressed with the young Albert Einstein and wrote him a letter of recommendation for a position at the University of Zurich. He in turn admired her “sparkling intelligence,” though once complained in private that she was “cold as a herring.”

In 1911, Rutherford made another breakthrough, building upon J. J. Thomson’s earlier theory about the structure of the atom. In an experiment, a sheet of thin gold foil was bombarded with high-velocity alpha-ray particles. As expected, most passed through and came out the other side. But some bounced back. When Rutherford learned of this, he rightly leaped to the notion that there was a dense core at the center of the gold atoms that had deflected the rays. He labeled this dense core the “nucleus.” He outlined a new model for the atom: mostly empty space, with a hard nucleus inside.

Marie paid close attention. After all, it was her isolation of radium that provided the key to the new field of radioactivity. She had created what she later called “a chemistry of the invisible.” It was now the age of nuclear physics, concerned with the nucleus of the atom, or subatomic particles.

At the same time Marie was keeping au courant in atomic physics, she had two young girls to raise. Because of her disdain for French schools, she threw her energy into organizing an experimental school for ten children—Irène as well as the children of Sorbonne professors who agreed to teach there. The experimental school lasted for two years, a chance for lucky children to learn from top-notch scholars. She herself taught physics and the first course ever on radioactivity. Like her father, Marie believed that science should be taught early but not too rigidly, with lots of hands-on experiments as well as time for games and physical activities. Her students, for example, proved that heavier bodies fall at the same rate as lighter ones by dipping bicycle ball bearings in ink and then watching the ink trails left as the ball bearings fell down slanted surfaces.

Sadly she admitted, “I want to bring up my children as well as possible, but even they cannot awaken life in me.” Her emotions frozen, she was more dutiful than loving. It was most crucial to her that the girls become “invulnerable.” At home she made sure her daughters exercised every day, installing a trapeze and other gym equipment in the backyard, making time for bike trips, swimming lessons, tennis games, horseback riding. Pierre’s father, still the perfect babysitter, kept the household running, with help from maids and occasionally cooks.

As the only one qualified to take Pierre’s place, Marie also became the first woman lecturer at the Sorbonne. She was appointed to take over his classes, but not—horrors—to receive a full professorship with all its benefits. (That didn’t come until two years later.) On the day of her first lecture, hundreds came, including Irène, photographers, socialites in enormous hats, gawkers perhaps expecting an emotional outburst.

Instead, tense and pale, she started out: “When we examine our recent progress in the domain of physics, a period of time that comprises only a dozen years, we are certainly struck by an evolution that has nourished fundamental notions regarding the nature of electricity and of matter.”

Not many of the casual spectators realized it, but those had been the exact final words of Pierre’s last lecture, and she went on from there, seamlessly integrating her words with his.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Embarrassment—on a National Scale

O
NE NIGHT IN 1910, Marie arrived at a dinner wearing a white dress with a pink rose pinned to it, instead of her plain black mourning attire. What sort of announcement was she making? Whom was she hoping to impress?

As solitary as she sometimes seemed, she did have a small circle of loyal friends. One was physicist Paul Langevin, a former star student of Pierre’s. Einstein once said that if he hadn’t already come up with the special theory of relativity, Langevin would have. Marie admired his “wonderful intelligence” . . . and perhaps also his stylish handlebar mustache. He was five years her junior and currently working with electron theory and magnetism.

He was also a married man with four children, though his marriage had long been an unhappy one. He and Marie fell in love, attended conferences together, and eventually rented a small apartment near the Sorbonne as a secret meeting place. She would leave the lab at noon, go grocery-shopping, have lunch with him at the apartment. They exchanged mushy letters: “I am so impatient to see you” . . . “I embrace you with all my tenderness.” In one she offered a list of suggestions for extricating himself from his marriage, so precise they read like a science experiment. To her, Langevin was a second chance at happiness with a protégé of Pierre’s, a scientific peer; she even envisioned having more children.

Emboldened on all fronts, she allowed colleagues to nominate her for membership in the all-male Academy of Sciences, the most powerful science organization in France. After all, she was already a member of equivalent academies in Poland, Holland, Sweden, the United States, and Russia. Still, “science is useless to women,” raved a French woman writer in one newspaper. Marie’s ambition was just too masculine. In 1911, the academy rejected her—by a single vote. She would never have anything to do with it or its publications again.

Meanwhile, Langevin’s wife began making death threats against Marie. In a position to know, Langevin warned Marie to take them seriously; some of her friends were concerned for her safety.

Later in 1911, Marie received two telegrams at almost the same time. Good news and bad news. One telegram informed her that she had just won her second Nobel Prize, this time for Chemistry. It was for essentially the same work as her first Nobel, for Physics, but the Swedish Academy decided that isolating pure radium—which she had done through chemical processes—was “much greater than the discovery of other elements.”

Quite a triumph, but the other piece of news was devastating. Those mushy love letters? They’d been leaked to the press. Months earlier, Langevin’s wife had hired a detective who managed to steal the letters from Paul’s desk at the apartment.

Once the romance hit the newspapers, the scandal was the talk of Paris. Then as now, papers were eager to exploit drama to make money, not only reporting gossip but also fabricating stories. The tabloids throbbed with lurid rumors—was Pierre’s death
really
an accident?

All blame fell squarely on Marie, a double standard hard at work. Married men’s affairs were often no secret and tolerated by their wives, while a woman’s adultery was by law a crime. Marie was a home-wrecker, no longer a “French heroine” but once again a “dirty foreigner” destroying a proper French family. Those who disapproved of a successful woman in a powerful position—one now without a husband to make her more conventionally “acceptable”—railed against her. Some Sorbonne professors demanded that she get out of France. Anti-Semitic writers claimed that she was Jewish.

To some, her behavior was somehow treasonous, a symbol of France’s decline. With rivalries among European countries escalating in the pre-World War I years, national pride was a serious issue. The scandal played into France’s insecurities that foreign countries were overtaking them.

One newspaper editor published such trashy articles that Langevin challenged him to a duel. Armed with loaded pistols, they met in a park. But at the critical moment, neither could bring himself to fire. All was silence except for the murmuring of pigeons. Langevin said later, “I am not an assassin,” while the editor claimed having last-minute “scruples about depriving French science of a precious brain.”

The furor was excruciating for someone so private she dreaded publicity even when it was flattering. Einstein urged Marie to “simply stop reading that drivel,” though behind her back he told a friend, “She is not attractive enough to become dangerous for anyone.”

Marie tried to fight back. She issued one statement after another, never exactly denying the affair, but objecting to the invasion of her private life: “There is nothing in my acts which obliges me to feel diminished,” she insisted. She threatened to sue newspapers, promising to demand “considerable sums which will be used in the interest of science.”

But when her house became a tourist attraction, with disapproving Parisians throwing stones at her windows, she finally took her children and left town. Her life in science had to stop for the time being. She grieved at being forced to interrupt her current project in the lab, working with a dutch physicist to study radiation from radium at very low temperatures.

Marie was crushed. She continued to stand by Langevin and remain cordial—one friend noted that she was “capable of walking through fire for those she loves”—but it was absolutely unthinkable that they keep seeing each other.

Worst of all, the Nobel Committee tactlessly wrote to ask her to please
not
come to Sweden to accept her prize. In fact, the committee members implied they wouldn’t have bestowed it had they known about the love letters. She stood up for herself, indignantly firing a letter back: “I believe there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of my private life.” And off she went to Stockholm to pick up her prize, taking Bronia and Irène for company.

Her dignified speech was not shy about claiming full credit for her accomplishments. Radioactivity “is an infant that I saw being born, and I have contributed to raising it with all my strength. The child has grown; it has become beautiful.” She talked about “the chemistry of the imponderable,” that scientists were no longer working just with materials they could observe with the naked eye.

But once back in Paris, she was rushed to the hospital, suffering from a kidney ailment as well as the most severe depression of her life. Her weight dropped from 123 to 103 pounds. She had to leave her daughters in the care of family members and governesses. Fearing she was on her deathbed, she wrote seven pages of instructions for the distribution of all the radium in her possession.