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.