Chapter Twelve

JADWIGA and IRÉN (Gold)

MOST NEW STUDENTS and researchers joined the Curie lab at the start of the fall semester, but Jadwiga Szmidt arrived in January 1911, amid the excitement and disappointment of the Académie vote. She had been teaching at a girls’ school in St. Petersburg, having grown up, as Mme. Curie did, in an academically oriented family under Russian domination in what had once been Poland. She was twenty-one years old and capable of discussing physics in Polish, Russian, English, German, French, and Italian.

As Jadwiga Szmidt absorbed the techniques specific to radioactivity, she overheard quiet conversations in the lab concerning the great injustice dealt to Madame by the Académie des Sciences. Some workers predicted that “la patronne” would gain admission on her next attempt. But the elite position of Académicien carried a lifetime tenure, so openings arose only occasionally. No one could say when another opportunity might present itself, or whether Mme. Curie would seize that opportunity. For now, she buried the incident under a weight of other obligations, such as the creation of the radium standard and the construction of the new radium institute under the joint auspices of the Sorbonne and the Institut Pasteur.

Marie had dreamt of a laboratory in the countryside, where one could take breaks in the open air. Since the chosen location for the new institute on the rue des Nourrices stood well within the city limits, she began planting rose bushes and linden trees there, even before the first foundation stones were laid. Over the next two or three years, she reckoned, the saplings and rambler roses would grow along with the tan brick-and-stone structures, ready to provide shade and bloom by the time of the official opening. As soon as the buildings began to take shape, Marie visited the site regularly and met with the architect, Henri-Paul Nénot. Her input guided every decision regarding the Pavillon Curie, from the large size of the rooms to the height of the tall windows and the inclusion of an elevator, which she deemed a must.

As the uneasy separation from Paul Langevin wore on, she continued to communicate with him by letter. At Easter time their letters to each other, which had accumulated in a drawer at the rue Banquier flat, were stolen. Shortly after the theft, Mme. Langevin’s brother-in-law informed Mme. Curie that her compromising letters were now in his possession and would soon be used to ignite a scandal.

Days passed, then weeks, and still the threatened exposure did not occur. Marie enjoyed a pleasant diversion in mid-May when her friend Hertha Ayrton came to Paris to address the Physics Society. Her invited lecture, about the formation of sand ripples on the sea floor, included lively demonstrations with large, oscillating tanks of water, every gallon of which had to be carried up to the fourth-floor amphitheater for the event. Mrs. Ayrton made the rotation of the eddies visible by throwing handfuls of pepper, bronze powder, or drops of paint into the tanks at key moments. On the weekend, Alice Chavannes hosted both Hertha and Marie at a luncheon party in their honor, and then Hertha went home with Marie to visit Irène and Ève.

Ève’s musical talent continued to be a source of pride for her mother. In June Marie arranged for the child, now six, to perform for Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the renowned pianist and composer. “Paderewski thinks she has exceptional ability,” Marie crowed in her journal, quoting his exact words in Polish. “I suspected as much. Though I understand nothing of music, I felt strongly that she didn’t play like just anybody.”

Marie had kudos to spare for her laboratory “daughters” as well, especially Ellen Gleditsch, who was still analyzing ores in pursuit of the radium-uranium ratio. Unfortunately, Sybil Leslie had not yet published any of her work with thorium, which meant that her financial support from England—her Exhibition of 1851 Scholarship—would end with the summer instead of extending through a third year in France.

“I think my work will be in a fit form for publication when I leave here,” Sybil wrote to her mentor, Arthur Smithells. “It is really suffering from too much radioactivity. A number of people seem to be employing radium emanation at present and my electroscope is disagreeably sensitive to the influence of anyone entering from the ‘salle active’ so that I spend half my time in keeping dangerous people out & in airing the room. Formerly more care was taken to prevent the distribution of activity all over the laboratory but as the foundations for a new Institute of Radioactivity for Mme. Curie are now laid, all precautions seem to have been abandoned.”

Despite her concerns, Sybil managed within a couple of weeks to ascertain the atomic weight of thorium emanation. She succeeded by following the same procedures and using the same apparatus that André Debierne had employed to determine the atomic weight of actinium emanation. She presented her results to the Académie des Sciences at the end of July via chemist Paul Villard, a good friend of the Curie lab and famous for the discovery of a third type of radioactivity emission, “gamma rays.” With one paper published in the Comptes rendus, Sybil submitted another to Le Radium on the solid breakdown products of thorium. In light of these achievements, the scholarship committee agreed to support her research for another year, which she arranged to spend back home in England—at Manchester, with Ernest Rutherford.

Marie decamped briefly in July to collaborate with Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at his cryogenic laboratory in Leiden. Only there could she expand her tests of radium’s intrinsic properties into the extremes of frigid temperatures, near absolute zero. When she returned from the Netherlands, she learned of the latest broken link in the Langevin marriage bond: A violent argument had driven Paul to leave the house with his sons, Jean and André. After consulting a lawyer, he took the boys to London for a month, and during that time Mme. Langevin filed suit against him for abandonment.

The prospect of an ugly public trial colored the rest of that summer, including Marie’s long-planned reunion with her family in a high, green retreat near the Dluskis’ sanitarium. She sent her daughters east with their governess soon after the school semester ended, promising to join them for her own much briefer vacation later. Meanwhile she all but locked herself in the lab, working evenings and Sundays to finish her preparation of the radium standard.

“We eat ice cream twice a week,” Irène reported from Zakopane. “When you come here, I hope you will keep Aunt Helena from trying to make me eat, eat, eat because I can’t eat so much.”

Ève wrote, too: “Sweet Mé! Every day I do my gymnastics morning and evening after I practice my music, then reading and handwriting. I don’t have friends my age but I’m going to and I would very much like to know when you will come.” While waiting for Mé, the sisters rode horseback for the first time and picked wild berries as their mother had done in her own girlhood. When Mé finally arrived, she led them on hiking and camping excursions in the Tatra Mountains. And when it was time to go home, they took along Cousin Hanna, age fourteen, to spend the year living with them and attending school in Paris.

Fall 1911 brought Ellen Gleditsch back to the city for a fifth year in the Curie lab. She had recently been named a university fellow at her home institution in Norway. The new position came with teaching responsibilities, but Ellen had been exempted from these for the current academic year in order to complete her licenciée at the Sorbonne under Mme. Curie. Madame’s demonstrated faith in her had confirmed Ellen’s commitment to research. Now in her early thirties, Ellen could not imagine dividing her time between her chosen work and any man. When questioned on the subject of marriage, she would simply say that “chemistry is my everything.”

The familiar laboratory looked different without her friends and housemates. Eva Ramstedt had returned to Stockholm, Jadwiga Szmidt to St. Petersburg, and Sybil Leslie to England. But Ellen found another newcomer to put at ease, to coach from her own experience, and to learn from: Irén Götz, twenty-two, had just crowned her chemistry studies at the University of Budapest with a brilliant thesis on the quantitative measures of radium emanation.

At the end of October Marie saw Paul again for the first time in months. They met in Brussels—not for a secret tryst but as two prominent scientists invited to participate in an exclusive private discussion of the latest developments in physics, hosted by the successful industrial chemist Ernest Solvay. Unlike the previous year’s international congress, which had drawn hundreds of practitioners to the Belgian capital, the 1911 Solvay Council grouped its twenty-four attendees around a single conference table in the Hotel Metropole. Marie and Paul were flanked by their friends and countrymen Jean Perrin and Henri Poincaré, as well as by Ernest Rutherford and James Jeans from England, plus a dozen other researchers of equal repute, including the thirty-two-year-old Albert Einstein, a professor of theoretical physics in Prague. As usual, Marie found herself the only woman present.

If the Langevin marriage was in crisis, so too was the science of physics. Its foundations had been shaken by a decade of discoveries, beginning with X-rays and radioactivity, which were still not fully understood. Moreover, Max Planck of Berlin, who now sat across from Marie at the table, had argued that energy did not flow in a continuous stream, as had long been assumed, but was chopped up into discrete packets that he and Einstein called “quanta.” This new view of energy remained highly controversial, which was the reason it topped the Solvay Council agenda. The week promised to spark intense discussions, all moderated by Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, a University of Leiden professor whose investigations into the nature and behavior of light had earned him the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics.

First Solvay Council, Brussels, 1911: Mme. Curie confers at table with Henri Poincaré; Jean Perrin leans his head on his hand beside her. Ernest Rutherford stands directly behind her, with James Jeans to his right and, to his left, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Albert Einstein, and Paul Langevin. Founder Ernest Solvay is seated third from left, with chairman Hendrik Lorentz to his left. Max Planck is standing second from left.

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Lorentz, at fifty-eight a senior member of the group, had earned a reputation for disarming, skillful diplomacy. “As things stand,” he acknowledged at the start of the meeting, physicists “currently have the feeling that we have reached an impasse. The old theories have proved themselves less and less capable of illuminating the dark shadows that seem to surround us.”

Into this darkness, Lorentz said, the “beautiful hypothesis” first proposed by Planck and later applied by Einstein “has come as a precious ray of light” to reveal “quite unexpected horizons.” Even those who viewed the quantum idea with “a measure of distrust”—and Lorentz counted himself one of them—“must nonetheless recognize its importance and its potential.”

The intellectual conference in Brussels ended on November 3. On the fourth, a damning article appeared in the Paris daily le Journal, headlined “A Story of Love: Madame Curie and Professor Langevin.” Other papers seized on the gossip and embellished it. When the front page of le Petit Journal trumpeted “A Romance in a Laboratory: The Love Affair of Mme. Curie and M. Langevin,” an outraged Jacques Curie leapt to Marie’s defense. “In the name of the Curie family,” he wrote in a letter to the editor, “it may be useful to say that my sister-in-law has always been in her private life as perfect and remarkable as she has been distinguished from the scientific and general point of view.” She had brought only happiness to her husband—“impossible to imagine two natures more perfectly matched”—and to Dr. Curie, who passed the last years of his life in her home. Jacques himself felt as profoundly attached to her as to a true sister. “I believe I can say that she and I have full confidence in each other, coming from the bottoms of our hearts, and that nothing in the future will ever part us.”

Marie had only just refuted the most scurrilous of the press accounts—and won a printed apology from a guilty reporter—when she received word on November 7, her forty-fourth birthday, that she was to be awarded a second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, for the discovery of radium and polonium, the determination of radium’s atomic weight, and its purification in the metallic state.

Navigating a path between scandal and tribute, she wrote privately to Svante Arrhenius, the 1903 laureate in chemistry who now occupied a commanding position on the Nobel Committee. She thanked him for the great honor. However, she said, she feared the rumors circulating about her might disturb the solemnity of the December ceremony, and she wanted his opinion as to whether she should attend it or stay away. Arrhenius assured her that no one in Stockholm believed the lies in the French press. He urged her to plan her trip without delay.

As these letters traveled to and from Sweden, the set of letters stolen from the rue Banquier apartment at last appeared in print in the weekly l’Oeuvre. On November 23, the day of the publication, a mob gathered outside Marie’s house in Sceaux, denouncing the “foreign woman,” the “husband stealer.” André Debierne came to her rescue. He shepherded Marie and the children to a safe haven at the Paris apartment of their friends Émile and Marguerite Borel.

Paul Langevin felt compelled to challenge the editor of l’Oeuvre, Gustave Téry, to a duel. Téry’s article had branded Paul “a cad and a scoundrel”—insults that required a specific response from a gentleman of the Belle Époque. Paul conscripted mathematician Paul Painlevé to be his second, then went to purchase a pistol. Langevin and Téry met on the field of honor in the Bois de Vincennes at 11:00 a.m. on November 26, but neither man fired a shot. As Téry later stated in the pages of l’Oeuvre, “I had scruples about depriving French science of a precious brain.”

The published letters and the much-publicized duel caused Svante Arrhenius to reconsider Mme. Curie’s visit to Stockholm. “All my colleagues have told me it is preferable that you not come here on December 10,” he wrote her on December 1. “I therefore beg you to stay in France.”

“The action which you advise,” Marie replied, “would appear to be a grave error on my part. In fact the prize has been awarded for the discovery of Radium and Polonium. I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.” She could not see why her acceptance of this supreme recognition for her research “should be influenced by libel and slander concerning my private life.” She believed many people shared her view of the situation, and she felt “very saddened” that Arrhenius himself did not.

The strong tone of her letter masked the fact that she was drained by the ongoing ordeal, and also ill with a vaguely diagnosed kidney ailment. As before, when she shared the physics prize in 1903, she did not feel well enough to travel, but she would not back down. Both Bronya and Irène accompanied her to Stockholm. Although she had come to receive her second Nobel Prize, she now got her first taste of official Nobel festivities. She attended the formal ceremony at the Royal Academy of Music in a simple dress that stood out against a sea of tuxedos and white ties, bowing as King Gustaf handed her the eighteen-karat gold medal and ornate diploma in their leather cases. At the banquet that followed in the Hall of Mirrors of the Grand Hôtel, she drank champagne and dined on lobster with pickled winter vegetables and Jerusalem artichoke purée, guinea hen with porcini mushrooms and lingonberries, poached pearl onions with parsley roots and velouté sauce, topped off by mandarin and white chocolate mousse on a cinnamon-spiced cake with raspberry marmalade and fresh raspberries. In December.

“Radioactivity is a very young science,” she reminded the king and other diners in her brief banquet remarks. “It is a child whom I saw being born, and whom I have helped, with all my strength, to raise. The child has grown, it has become beautiful.”

Her acceptance lecture, delivered the next day at the Nobel Institute, perforce recalled Pierre and their shared years in the shed. As Pierre always did, she named the other scientists who had made essential contributions to the study of radioactivity: Henri Becquerel, Ernest Rutherford, Frederick Soddy, William Ramsay, André Debierne. She credited Rutherford in particular with establishing “a backbone for the new science, in the form of a very precise theory [i.e., transmutation and the pattern of radioactive decay] admirably suited to the study of the phenomena.” She also clarified her role in the unfolding of events around radium: “The history of the discovery and isolation of this substance furnished proof of my hypothesis, which holds that radioactivity is an atomic property of matter and can provide a method for finding new elements.” She proudly described every step that had led to radium’s secure placement on Mendeleev’s periodic table.

Unfortunately, she said, she had not achieved the same for polonium despite her mighty efforts over the years. She blamed the difficulty on the minuscule proportion of polonium in pitchblende. Radium was rare enough, but polonium far rarer—by a factor of five thousand.

Rarity severely limited the radioactivity researcher, Mme. Curie pointed out. Most labs involved in this work had only a milligram of radium salts at their disposal, at most a gram—a quantity valued at 400,000 francs (about double the monetary portion of her Nobel Prize). “And yet we have methods of measuring so perfect and so sensitive that we are able to know very exactly the small quantities of radium we are using … to within 1 percent of a thousandth of a milligram.” In other words, “we have here an entirely separate kind of chemistry … which we might well call the chemistry of the imponderable.”