by Craig Nelson
Manya Skłodowska Curie became the first woman in French history to be awarded a doctorate, in June of 1903. Sister Bronya, now practicing medicine in Poland, returned to celebrate. She insisted Marie buy a new dress for the occasion, and just as she had for her wedding, she got one that would work equally well as lab wear. Ernest Rutherford, the discoverer of the classical model of the atom (with electrons orbiting nuclei much as the planets revolve around the sun), visited from Canada and was astonished by the Curies’ lab in the cadaver hut, as well as by the celebratory garden party at Paul Langevin’s that evening, illuminated by radium vials—“The luminosity was brilliant in the darkness and it was a splendid finale to an unforgettable day”—and the sight of Pierre’s deeply swollen, burnt hands. When earlier that month the Curies had been the guests of London’s Royal Academy, Pierre was so ill and his hands so damaged that he needed help in buttoning his clothes, and during the middle of the Friday Evening Discourse before Lord Kelvin, he fumbled and spilled some of the precious radium.
Pierre’s health now rapidly deteriorated, and he frequently woke up in the middle of the night, unable to stop moaning from an untreatable pain. He said he was “neither very well, nor very ill. . . . I am easily fatigued, and I have left only a very feeble capacity for work.” His wife was also suffering; the couple’s fingertips were permanently damaged. Marie had lost twenty pounds, and in August she miscarried, telling Bronya that she “had grown so accustomed to the idea of the child that I am absolutely desperate and cannot be consoled.”
In the summer of 1904, Pierre’s “rheumatism” was so severe that he had to cancel going to Stockholm to give their Nobel lecture. Marie learned she was pregnant once again and, worrying over the loss of her miscarriage, abandoned her work and joined her sick husband and daughter, along with frère Jacques and his family, in a farmhouse in Saint-Rémy, just outside Paris. The couple’s second child, daughter Ève, was born on December 6, 1904. Marie: “I have been frequently questioned, especially by women, how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.”
Their life of penury, at least, was over. Baron Edmond de Rothschild became a substantial donor, and industrialist Armet de Lisle started a company to produce radium and gave the Curies a laboratory on the factory grounds. They could now afford a servant to cook and clean, but the woman never heard a word of praise. Finally she could take it no longer and directly asked Pierre what he thought of her roast. In a near parody of the absentminded professor, he replied: “Did I eat a beefsteak? It’s quite possible.”
Marie confided to sister Helen, visiting over the summer of 1905, that Pierre’s attacks of severe back pain were now more frequent, and more severe. She worried that he had contracted something the doctors couldn’t diagnose, and that he would never recover.
On April 14, 1906, Pierre took the train from Paris to spend a day with his family at the Saint-Rémy farmhouse. The two parents sat together in a meadow, watching Irène, who was obsessed with butterflies. Though Marie had “a little heartache” about Pierre’s continuing medical troubles, she later wrote, “We were happy. [I] had this feeling I had had recently a lot, that nothing was going to trouble us.”
On the sixteenth, Pierre returned to Paris, and she joined him two days later.
On the nineteenth, he left his lab at around 10:00 a.m. to travel across town for a meeting of the Association of the Professors of the Science Faculties, of which he was vice president, at the Hôtel des Sociétés des Savants on rue Danton. Paul Langevin was there, as was Joseph Kowalski, the friend in common who had introduced Pierre to Marie twelve years before. Pierre was in such a good spirit that he invited everyone at the luncheon to his house that night.
He then headed out to Gauthier-Villars, publisher of the leading Parisian science journal, Comptes rendus. There, he would read proofs and, after, would do a little research in the library of the Institut de France.
He arrived at the publisher to discover that the offices were closed, due to a strike. So, he headed off to the library. A block away, he approached the Pont Neuf and the rue Dauphine and began to cross. It was raining, and foggy. Onetime milkman Louis Manin was driving two Percheron stallions hauling a thirty-foot wagon loaded with six thousand kilos of military uniforms and supplies. Manin started to rein his animals to allow a tram to pass, but the tram conductor signed for him to proceed. As he did so, Manin passed a carriage, and right behind it, Pierre appeared, rushing by foot across the street. He bumped into one of Manin’s horses, tripped, and grabbed it to keep from falling to the pavement. Both horses reared. Pierre fell. Manin jerked left to keep the horses from trampling M. Curie and succeeded in keeping the hooves and his wagon’s front wheels from striking the physicist. Daughter Ève: “His body passed between the feet of the horses without even being touched, and then between the two front wheels of the wagon. A miracle was possible. But the enormous mass, dragged on by its weight of six tons, continued for several yards more. The left back wheel encountered a feeble obstacle which it crushed in passing: a human head. The cranium was shattered and a red, viscous matter trickled in all directions in the mud: the brain of Pierre Curie.”
Parisians surrounded the cart and began threatening the driver; the police arrived to protect him from a growing and enraged mob. Officials decided the tragedy was a result of bad weather, visibility, and the victim’s not paying attention to what he was doing. Famously absentminded and distracted, Pierre Curie was in a weakened state from his poor health and likely did not see the wagon from under his large umbrella. Manin was acquitted of blame.
As no ambulance could reach through the mob, the officers carried the dying man on a stretcher to a pharmacy, where a druggist reported there was nothing anyone could do. The police then carried him to the station in the Hôtel des Monnaies, where a doctor pronounced him dead, and went to the Sorbonne, where the dean of the science faculty, Paul Appell, was informed. Appell then went with Curie friend and neighbor Jean Perrin to boulevard Kellermann to tell Marie. But, she and Irène had gone to spend the afternoon in the countryside, at Fontenay-aux-Roses. The two scientists did not want to reveal the terrible news to the elderly Dr. Curie, but after learning who they were, he took one look at their drawn faces and announced, “My son is dead.”
When the thirty-eight-year-old Marie returned that evening at seven, Pierre’s father told her what had happened: “I enter the room. Someone says: ‘He is dead.’ Can one comprehend such words? Pierre is dead, he who I had seen leave looking fine this morning, he who I expected to press in my arms this evening. I will only see him dead and it’s over forever. I repeat your name again and always ‘Pierre, Pierre, Pierre, my Pierre,’ alas that doesn’t make him come back, he is gone forever, leaving me nothing but desolation and despair.”
The notably tough Marie Curie became unmoored at this loss. “Crushed by the blow, I did not feel able to face the future [as] an incurably and wretchedly lonely person.” She felt she couldn’t go on, either as a person or as a scientist. Her Mourning Journal is a testimony to the horror of grief, loss, death:
They brought you in and placed you on the bed. . . . I kissed you and you were still supple and almost warm. . . . Pierre, my Pierre, you are there, calm as a poor wounded man resting in his sleep, his head bandaged. Your face is sweet, as if you dream. Your lips, which I used to call hungry, are livid and colorless. . . . Your little graying beard; one can barely see your hair, because the wound begins there, and on the right one can see the bone sticking out from under the forehead. Oh! How you were hurt, how you bled, your clothes were inundated with blood. What a terrible shock your poor head, that I had caressed so often, taking it in my hands, endured. And I still kiss your eyelids which you close so often that I could kiss them, offering me your head with the familiar movement which I remember today, which I will see fade more and more in my memory. . . .
We put you in the coffin Saturday morning, I held your head. . . . Then some flowers in the casket and
the little picture of me . . . that you loved so much. . . . It was the picture of the one you chose as your companion, of the one who had the happiness to please you so much that you didn’t hesitate to make her the offer of sharing your life, even when you had only seen her a few times. And you had said to me many times it was the only time in your life when you acted without any hesitation, because you were absolutely convinced that it was right. . . .
Your coffin was closed and I could see you no more. . . . I was alone with the coffin and I put my head against it. . . . I spoke to you. I told you that I loved you in that I had always loved you with all my heart. . . . I promised that I would never give another the place that you occupied in my life and that I would try to live as you would have wanted me to live. And it seemed to me that from this cold contact of my forehead with the casket something came to me, something like a calm and an intuition that I would yet find the courage to live. Was this an illusion or was it an accumulation of energy coming from you and condensing in the closed casket which thus came to me as an act of charity on your part? . . . I got up after having slept rather well, relatively calm. That was barely a quarter of an hour ago, and now I want to howl again—like a savage beast. . . .
In the street I walk as if hypnotized, without attending to anything. I shall not kill myself. I have not even the desire for suicide. But among all these vehicles is there not one to make me share the fate of my beloved? . . . I feel very much that all my ability to live is dead in me, and I have nothing left but the duty to raise my children and also the will to continue the work I have agreed to.
Bronya had arrived to comfort her grief-wracked sister for two months, and now it was time for her to return to Zakopane. Marie asked her to come with her to the bedroom, where, in the middle of a hot June, the fireplace roared. The widow locked the door behind them and took a bulky package from her armoire. Retrieving a strong set of shears from the mantel, she asked her sister to sit beside her, before the fire. Then she cut open the parcel to reveal the bloody, mud-drenched clothes Pierre had been wearing when he was killed, which Marie had been saving all this time. She began cutting the material into pieces and throwing it onto the flames but, finding pieces of her husband’s body on part of a coat, she burst into tears and began kissing it. Bronya took the scissors from her and continued cutting, and burning, until everything was consumed. Marie then asked, “Tell me, how am I going to manage to live. I know that I must, but how shall I do it? How can I do it?” She fell into a spasm of sobbing, and Bronya tried to comfort her.
Marie could no longer live where she and Pierre had spent the whole of their married life and went to look for another home, deciding finally to move to 6 rue du Chemin de Fer, in Sceaux, close by her husband’s tomb. When Dr. Curie died in 1910, she had Pierre disinterred, putting her father-in-law’s coffin first, then Pierre, with room for her on top.
Marie Curie never forgave France for what she considered its rude treatment of her husband in failing to give him either the honors or the laboratory facilities he merited. Following his lead, she, too, refused the Legion of Honor and devoted the rest of her life to erecting a laboratory in Paris worthy of Pierre’s memory. In 1909, the Pasteur Institute offered to build a Curie lab, but this would have meant Marie’s resignation from the Sorbonne. Suddenly the university rose to action, collaborating with the Pasteur to build the Radium Institute, with one lab for Marie, and another for Claude Regaud, who researched to perfect curietherapy.
Its street was named rue Pierre Curie.
Four years after the accident that took Pierre’s life, in the spring of 1910, Marguerite Borel, the novelist daughter of Sorbonne chair Paul Appell, commented, “Everybody said Marie Curie is dead to the world. She is a scientist walled in behind her grief.” But, after years of widowhood, Marie began to resurrect. She stopped wearing all black and physically appeared to regain decades of youth.
The secret was as old as time, and Paris. She was in love.
For a century after first becoming famous, the public would hold of Marie Curie an image of a brain without a heart; a scientist, but not a wife or mother; a hero of women’s rights as iconic as George Washington . . . and as a figurehead, just as lacking in humanity. Even though her greatest work was achieved when she was in her thirties, she is remembered as an asexual, emotionless old woman . . . but there are clear reasons for these misperceptions. At the height of her fame, a journalist asked for details of her childhood, of her psychology, of her emotions, and Mme. Curie refused, explaining, “In science we must be interested in things, not in persons.” She told another reporter, “There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.” Albert Einstein wrote, “Madame Curie is very intelligent but has the soul of a herring, which means that she is poor when it comes to the art of joy and pain.” Additionally, though he admired her immensely, her main method of expressing emotion, he said, was in griping. But a great reason for Marie Curie’s denuded public reputation was that her Mourning Journal was unknown for decades, as was her heartbreaking love affair with Pierre’s student Paul Langevin, a wildly handsome and extravagantly brilliant scientist famous for his magnetic theories, his quartz oscillators, and his termagant of a wife.
Their very public affair caused such a scandal that the Curie descendants would suppress its details for the next forty years.
Paul Langevin first met the Curies as a seventeen-year-old municipal school student under teacher Pierre in 1888 and was, in effect, a protégé of both husband and wife. When Pierre left for the Sorbonne in 1904, Paul was hired to replace him at the city school; he taught alongside Marie at Sèvres, and when she replaced Pierre at the Sorbonne in 1906, he was given her post. Paul said, at Pierre’s funeral, “The hour when we knew we could meet him, when he loved to talk about his science, the walk that we often took with him, these bring back his memory day after day, evoke his kindly and pensive face, his luminous eyes, his beautifully expressive head, shaped by twenty-five years spent in the laboratory, by a life of unrelenting work, of complete simplicity, at once thoughtful and industrious, by his continual concern with moral beauty, by an elegance of mind which produced in him the habit of believing nothing, of doing nothing, of saying nothing, of accepting nothing, in his thought or in his actions which was not perfectly clear and which he did not entirely understand.” Of Langevin, Einstein was equally fulsome: “In his scientific thinking Langevin possessed an extraordinary vivacity and clarity . . . it seems to be certain that he would have developed the special theory of relativity if it had not been done elsewhere.”
Paul was brilliant, passionate about science, and good-looking. It was a wonderful match for the brokenhearted widow, but Langevin was also married, to Emma Jeanne Desfosses, a harridan who never tired of warmongering in the name of love. In their first year of marital unbliss, Desfosses’s mother and sister took letters from the newlywed husband’s pockets that described his troubled marriage so that Jeanne would have evidence in case of divorce. The following year, he appeared at the lab covered in bruises—during a fracas, the three women had thrown an iron chair at him. But M. Langevin was no bystander in this eternal drama, for when Jeanne stormed out after one fight and threatened to end the marriage, Paul begged her to return . . . a scenario that would be repeated endlessly over the years to come. Sorbonne physicist Jean Perrin and his wife, Henriette, were close with both the Curies and the Langevins, and after one violent spat Henriette recounted, “Often, during meals, M. Langevin, cruelly wounded by the words of his wife, left the table. The meal continued. . . . I was very sad to see the unhappiness of a friend that I liked with all my heart. . . . He said to me, ‘I don’t know who I can lean on. I have only my children and they are very small.’ ”
In the spring of 1910, Marie, having heard Jeanne’s tales of how her husband woefully mistreated her, criticized Paul to his face for his vile behavior. Langevin replied that she only knew half of the story; that in fact just the other day, Jeanne had cracked
a bottle on his head. Paul now found someone to lean on, regularly confiding in Marie about his terrible domestic conundrum—then suddenly, everything between them changed. Marie wrote, “I spent last evening and night thinking of you and the hours we had together. I hold the delicious memory. Still I see your eyes, kind and tender, and your warm smile and I can only dream of the moment that I find again the sweetness of your presence.” He replied, “I am trembling with impatience at the thought of seeing you return at last, and of telling you how much I missed you. I kiss you tenderly awaiting tomorrow.”
On July 15, 1910, Paul and Marie secretly rented an apartment together, at 5 rue du Banquier. They called it chez nous. Almost immediately, one of Jeanne’s servants fished a love letter from Paul to Marie out of the postal box and gave it to the wife. During their next brawl, she warned him, “You are going to see quite a scandal in the newspapers,” and asked their son, eleven years old, if he wanted to grow up to be like his father and cheat on his wife with a mistress. Marie told the Perrins that her and Paul’s “great friendship angered Mme. Langevin [and] that she had declared to her husband that she was going to get rid of this obstacle.” Paul explained to his lover, “That means that she would kill you.” Marie: “As long as I know you are near her my nights are atrocious. I cannot sleep. With the greatest difficulty I fall asleep at two or three o’clock and awake with the sensation of fever. I cannot even work. . . . I must be attached to you by very strong cords to make up my mind to preserve these cords at the risk of my position and my life.”