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.