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.”
Mir the Hessian
Mir the Hessian regretted killing his dog, he wept even as he forced its head from its body, yet what had he to eat but the dog? Freezing in the hills, far away from everyone.
Mir the Hessian cursed as he knelt on the rocky ground, cursed his bad luck, cursed his company for being dead, cursed his country for being at war, cursed his countrymen for fighting, and cursed God for allowing it all to happen. Then he started to pray: it was the only thing left to do. Alone, in midwinter.
Mir the Hessian lay curled up among the rocks, his hands between his legs, his chin on his breast, beyond hunger, beyond fear. Abandoned by God.
The wolves had scattered the bones of Mir the Hessian, carried his skull to the edge of the water, left a tarsus on the hill, dragged a femur into the den. After the wolves came the crows, and after the crows the scarab beetles. And after the beetles, another soldier, alone in the hills, far away from everyone. For the war was not yet over.
My Neighbors in a Foreign Place
Directly across the courtyard from me lives a middle-aged woman, the ringleader of the building. Sometimes she and I open our windows simultaneously and look at each other for an instant in shocked surprise. When this happens, one of us looks up at the sky, as though to see what the weather is going to be, while the other looks down at the courtyard, as though watching for late visitors. Each is really trying to avoid the glance of the other. Then we move back from the windows to wait for a better moment.