Chapter Two

MARIE (Iron)

NOTHING IN MANYA’S prior travels prepared her for the grandeur of Paris. Although Warsaw boasted its own royal palace, ornate churches, fine townhouses, and historic monuments, they all wore the drab aura of the Russian occupation. In Paris, she found the city’s beauty heightened by the freedom of its citizens, who openly spoke their own language and discussed their ideals in public. Scientific research, which she had pursued in secret, here dominated numerous imposing spaces. The recently completed Louis Pasteur Institute was already drawing researchers from other countries and offering the world’s first courses in microbiology. A grand Gallery of Zoology had opened near the Museum of Natural History inside the Botanical Gardens—which were not merely ornamental but maintained a centuries-old herbarium of medicinal plants. And the new Eiffel Tower, though derided by many as a desecration of the skyline, bore at its base the engraved names of seventy-two astronomers, chemists, physicists, naturalists, engineers, and mathematicians whom France proudly counted among her native sons.

The University of Paris, the Sorbonne, existed as an exalted city within the city. It boasted a student population of nine thousand, and its professors delivered their lectures dressed formally in white tie and cutaway jacket.

In the first week of November 1891, Manya enrolled in the Faculté des sciences—one of only twenty-three women, among nearly two thousand men, to do so. She made her name sound at least half French by signing her registration card as Marie Sklodowska, and quickly grew accustomed to being addressed as “Mademoiselle.”

When evening came, however, and she returned home to her sister and brother-in-law, Paris disappeared. Stepping into the Dluskis’ apartment on the rue d’Allemagne transported her back to Warsaw. Everything about the place, from its décor to the friends it attracted, evoked Poland. Only the doctors’ patients were French. Bronya and her husband served the medical needs of a neighborhood called La Villette, near the slaughterhouses on the northeast outskirts of the city. Manya-Marie traveled from there to the Sorbonne and back via horse-drawn double-deck omnibuses, losing one full hour of study in each direction.

After a few months of this wearisome commuting, she decided her carfare could be better spent on renting a garret room in the Latin Quarter. In mid-March 1892 she wrote her brother, Józef, from her new lodgings at 3 rue Flatters. “It is a little room, very suitable, and nevertheless very cheap.” She could walk to the chemistry laboratory in fifteen minutes, to the lecture hall in twenty.

“I am working a thousand times as hard as at the beginning of my stay,” she told Józef. While living with the Dluskis, “my little brother-in-law had the habit of disturbing me endlessly. He absolutely could not endure having me do anything but engage in agreeable chatter with him when I was at home. I had to declare war on him on this subject.” Peace between them had since been restored. “Naturally, without the Dluskis’ help I should never have been able to arrange things like this.”

In the thrill of her independence, Marie ignored the fact that she did not know how to cook. Meals had simply appeared before her in her childhood home and throughout her employment as a governess. Now, away from Bronya’s table, she subsisted mainly on tea with buttered bread. She did not mind the limited diet, but soon her body rebelled in frequent dizzy spells. When she fainted in front of a Polish classmate, word reached the Dluskis, and Marie’s “little brother-in-law” forcibly took her back to La Villette for a week of proper nutrition. Then, with exams looming, she returned to her garret.

“The room I lived in,” she recalled in later years, “was in a garret, very cold in winter, for it was insufficiently heated by a small stove which often lacked coal. During a particularly rigorous winter, it was not unusual for the water to freeze in the basin in the night; to be able to sleep I was obliged to pile all my clothes on the bedcovers. In the same room I prepared my meals with the aid of an alcohol lamp and a few kitchen utensils. These meals were often reduced to bread with a cup of chocolate, eggs or fruit. I had no help in housekeeping and I myself carried the little coal I used up the six flights.” Even so, the life held “a real charm” for her.

“All that I saw and learned that was new delighted me. It was like a new world opened to me, the world of science, which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.”

The forces that governed the universe—gravity, electricity, magnetism—permeated the lectures she attended, the experiments she attempted, and the treatises she pored over in the library or read in her room till all hours. She realized early on, however, that her years of earnest solo dedication had not adequately prepared her for university study in mathematics. Even her presumed fluency in French sometimes faltered. So she redoubled her efforts, pushed herself harder. At the end of two years, she placed first in her class at the July 1893 examinations and received her degree in physical sciences, the licenciée ès sciences physiques.

Her educational adventure might have ended there, but a 600-ruble Alexandrovitch Scholarship bought her another garret room, another year at the Sorbonne. “I hardly need say that I am delighted to be back in Paris,” she wrote Józef in mid-September 1893 after a brief stay at home. “It was very hard for me to separate again from Father, but I could see that he was well, very lively, and that he could do without me—especially as you are living in Warsaw. And as for me, it is my whole life that is at stake.”

She was studying “unceasingly,” she said, in anticipation of the start of courses. This year she would work toward a mathematics degree. Her professors included physicist Gabriel Lippmann, who was at that time perfecting his theory of color photography, and famed mathematician Henri Poincaré.

Early in 1894 Professor Lippmann helped her secure a commission from the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry. She was to study the magnetic properties of dozens of varieties of steel—a matter of crucial commercial importance. Magnets had served as the essential components in navigational compasses for almost a millennium. More recently they had been put to wider use in electrical power technology. The electricity now coursing through the city of Paris enabled telegraph communication, powered streetcars, lit avenues at night, and sent elevators up and down the Eiffel Tower. New instruments were required to generate and measure the modern era’s much stronger electric currents, and these tools relied on magnets at their core.

The steel investigation, Lippmann suggested, might prove an appropriate topic for a doctoral dissertation, should Mademoiselle choose to progress to the highest level of scholarly achievement. Clearly he judged her capable of such distinction. Meanwhile the work would pay her a small subvention. Mindful of her own inexperience, Marie accepted a friend’s offer to introduce her to a potentially helpful physicist who was already well grounded in research on magnetism.

Marie’s first impression of Pierre Curie—“a tall young man with auburn hair and large, limpid eyes” standing in the recess of a glass door—lodged indelibly in her memory. He was thirty-five at the time, eight years her senior, though she thought he looked younger than that. “I noticed the grave and gentle expression of his face, as well as a certain abandon in his stance, suggesting the dreamer absorbed in his reflections.” He showed her “a simple cordiality.” As their conversation flitted from science to social and humanitarian concerns that animated them both, they sensed a surprising kinship.

Neither one of them had come to this arranged meeting with the expectation of finding a life partner. She had been painfully spurned in love. He had long since sworn off intimacy. As he rationalized in some diary notes set down at age twenty-two, “A woman loves life for the living of it far more than we do. Women of genius are rare. Thus when we … give all our thoughts to some work which estranges us from those nearest us, it is with women that we must struggle. The mother wants the love of her child above all things, even if she should make an imbecile of him. The mistress also wishes to possess her lover, and would find it quite natural to sacrifice the rarest genius in the world for an hour of love.”

Pierre Curie

Musée Curie (coll. ACJC)

They saw each other next at a meeting of the Physics Society, where Pierre was a regular fixture and a vocal participant in discussions. Soon afterward he sent her, care of Lippmann’s laboratory where she worked on her project, a copy of his recent publication about the symmetry between electric and magnetic fields. He inscribed it, “To Mlle. Sklodowska, with the respect and friendship of the author, P. Curie.”

“Some time later,” she wrote in her autobiographical essay, “he visited me in my student room and we became good friends.”

In French, the word for “magnet,” aimant, also means “loving.” Love makes an apt metaphor for the attraction of magnetic opposites. Two bar magnets will cling together when their opposite poles are put in proximity but repel one another if like ends meet. As in the case of human allure, magnetic attraction may fade with time. In fact, although scientists of the late nineteenth century divided magnetic materials into “permanent” and “temporary” categories, they conceded that “permanent magnetism” was probably as elusive as everlasting love. Marie’s assigned research, it was hoped, would expose those aspects of steel manufacture most favorable to the production of durable magnets.

Since ancient times, smelters had heated iron ore in charcoal fires to produce carbonized steel—a stronger, harder metal than iron for making weapons and tools. Modern French industrialists each followed a slightly different chemical formula, enriching their alloys with additional elements, such as chromium and manganese, to enhance one or another of steel’s most desirable qualities. Manufacturers further differentiated their steel products by customizing their methods of heating and cooling the material, whether by annealing, quenching, or tempering. They guarded the details of these practices as trade secrets.

Marie received forty-seven samples of French steel for her study. A few of these were shaped in the form of rings, but most were small bars, twenty centimeters (about eight inches) long and one centimeter square in cross section. It fell to her to determine which ones could be most readily magnetized and prove most likely to retain their acquired magnetism through the years.

Pierre had conducted his own independent research on magnetism at the school where he worked as director of student laboratories. In one project, he demonstrated that materials such as iron and nickel lost their magnetic properties when heated, and he took care to note the temperature at which this change occurred for each of several materials.[1] Pierre was quite familiar with the apparatus required to induce magnetism in pieces of steel, to measure a given magnet’s strength—in short, to subject magnets to almost any type of trial. He showed himself more than willing to share this knowledge with Marie.

Although it was uncharacteristic of either Marie or Pierre to allot much time to diversion, they somehow found opportunities to go places and do things together. One day he took her to Mi-Carême, the mid-Lenten carnival, where a jostling crowd carried Marie some distance away from him, so that minutes passed before they were reunited. The incident weighed on Pierre as a sign of how easily the bonds they were building might rupture. When he asked her to come meet his parents, at the home he still shared with them in the Parisian suburb of Sceaux, she fully grasped the import of the invitation.

She found Eugène and Sophie-Claire Curie to resemble her own father and mother in temperament, and she warmed to them as readily as she had to Pierre. Still, she could not commit herself to marrying a foreigner. As soon as she finished the academic term and received her licenciée ès sciences mathématiques—with the second highest rank in the exams this time—she hurried home to her own family.

That summer of 1894, separated by a thousand miles, she and Pierre corresponded regularly. “It would be a beautiful thing,” he wrote to her in August, “to pass through life together, hypnotized by our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science. Of all these dreams, I believe the last, alone, is legitimate.” Only in the realm of science, he explained, could they be certain of accomplishing more good than harm. “The territory here is more solid and obvious, and however small it is, it is truly in our possession.”

A few days later he worried, “I do not know why I have got it into my head to keep you in France, to exile you from your country and family without having anything good to offer you in exchange for such a sacrifice.” At the same time, he honestly believed that professional prospects for her were likely better in Paris than in Poland. If she would not marry him, might she agree to live with him in friendship? There were suitable rooms available “on the rue Mouffetard,” he informed her, “with windows overlooking a garden. This apartment is divided into two independent parts.”

In September she mailed him her photo, which pleased him “enormously.” He showed her off to his older brother, Jacques, who had been his partner through years of productive research and the invention of several patented scientific instruments, such as analytical balances and meters to assess electric charge. Jacques, a mineralogy professor at Montpelier, thought Marie had “a very decided look, even stubborn.”

When she did return to Paris, in October, she moved into a room at Bronya’s new medical office, which stood empty outside of visiting hours. Pierre continued his active pursuit as best he could from Sceaux, about six miles south of Paris, where his mother now lay seriously ill, and was being cared for by his father, the local medical doctor.

“I’m not coming to see you tonight,” Pierre apologized in a note canceling a midweek rendezvous. “My father has rounds to make and I will stay at Sceaux until tomorrow afternoon so that Maman won’t be alone.” In his uncomfortable insecurity, he added, “I sense that you must be having less and less regard for me while at the same time my affection for you grows each day.”

For all his brilliance and originality, not to mention the numerous papers he had published in the physics journals, Pierre had never bothered to complete a doctoral degree. After his undergraduate studies at the Sorbonne, he had served as a laboratory assistant for one of the faculty members, then took the job he currently held—organizing and running the student laboratories at an industrial school. His pupils adored him, and the administration smiled on his independent research activities. Occasionally Pierre pursued a study of some natural phenomenon purely for the joy of intellectual exercise, with no attempt to report his results or claim credit for a discovery. He was so averse to self-promotion that he chose not to apply for a better position when one of the teachers at his school resigned, creating a vacancy.

“What an ugly necessity is this of seeking any position whatsoever,” he complained in a letter to Marie. “I am not accustomed to this form of activity, demoralizing to the highest degree.” When the head of school tried to gain him an official academic recognition, Pierre sent a no-thank-you note that read in part: “I am told that you intend to propose me again to the préfet for the decoration. I beg of you not to do so. If you win this distinction for me, you will oblige me to refuse it, for I am resolved not to accept any sort of decoration. I hope that you will want to help me avoid taking a step that will make me look somewhat ridiculous to many people. If your intention is to offer me some evidence of your support, you have already done that, and much more effectively, in a way that touched me, by giving me the means to work without worry.”

Although Pierre was content, he earned only 300 francs per month, about the same salary as a factory laborer. Now Marie’s presence in his life provided the impetus to establish himself professionally, beginning with the preparation of a doctoral dissertation that described his findings of the previous four years, under the title “Magnetic Properties of Bodies at Diverse Temperatures.”

Marie watched with interest as Pierre successfully defended his thesis at the Sorbonne on a March afternoon in 1895, before a jury of faculty members that included her physics professor, Gabriel Lippmann. These men held Pierre’s future in their hands, but even as they sat in judgment of him, they assumed postures of rapt attention to his expert presentation. “I remember the simplicity and the clarity of the exposition,” she later wrote, “the esteem indicated by the attitude of the professors, and the conversation between them and the candidate, which reminded one of a meeting of the Physics Society.”

On the strength of his new credentials, as well as recommendations from distinguished scientists, Pierre rose to a new position created expressly for him as professor in the school where he had already worked for twelve years, the École Municipale de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles. His pay nearly doubled, to 6,000 francs per year. Nevertheless he declared himself willing to relocate to Poland if that was what Marie required of him.

In mid-July, she told her brother the reason for her abrupt reversal of plans regarding the summer holiday. She would not be returning to Warsaw as usual—perhaps not ever. Józef replied:

I think you are right to follow your heart, and no just person can reproach you for it. Knowing you, I am convinced that you will remain Polish with all your soul, and also that you will never cease to be part of our family … And we, too, will never cease to love you and to consider you ours.

I would infinitely rather see you in Paris, happy and contented, than back again in our country, broken by the sacrifice of a whole life and victim of a too-subtle conception of your duty. What we must do now is try to see each other as often as possible, in spite of everything.

A thousand kisses, dear Manya; and again let me wish you happiness, joy and success. Give my affectionate regards to your fiancé. Tell him that I welcome him as a future member of our family and that I offer him my friendship and sympathy without reserve. I hope that he will also give me his friendship and esteem.”

Józef and his young family could not travel to the wedding on July 26, 1895, but Marie’s father and her sister Helena came, and of course Bronya and Kazimierz Dluski. The ceremony took place at the town hall in Sceaux, where the bride and groom exchanged vows but not rings. Afterward Pierre’s parents hosted a small reception in the garden at their home. Then the newlyweds rode off on bicycles to honeymoon among the fishing villages of Brittany.

“When you receive this letter,” Marie told her childhood friend Kazia, “your Manya will have changed her name. I am going to marry the man I told you about last year in Warsaw. It is a sorrow to me to have to stay forever in Paris, but what am I to do? Fate has made us deeply attached to each other and we cannot endure the idea of separating.”

Marie and Pierre Curie as newlyweds, 1895

Photo Albert Harlingue. Musée Curie (coll. ACJC)

She would have written sooner, she apologized, but she had only very recently, and “quite suddenly,” reconciled herself to settling permanently in France.

“When you receive this letter, write to me: Madame Curie, School of Physics and Chemistry, 42 rue Lhomond. That is my name from now on. My husband is a teacher in that school. Next year I shall bring him to Poland so that he will know my country, and I shall not fail to introduce him to my dear little chosen sister, and I shall ask her to love him.”