Chapter Thirteen

HERTHA (Carbon)

MARIE RETURNED FROM Stockholm exhausted, overextended, and still afflicted by the kidney infection. Between her physical pain and her emotional pain, she could no longer tolerate the daily commute between Sceaux and the rue Cuvier. Nor could she face the jeers and gossip that continued to unsettle her once-peaceful home. She had found a large apartment within walking distance of the lab, at 36 quai de Béthune, on the Île Saint-Louis, and planned to move her family there in early January 1912. Although she hated to leave the area she associated so closely with Pierre, she had reason to believe she would soon rejoin him there as a permanent resident of the Sceaux cemetery. These morbid thoughts held a firm basis in Marie’s reality: at forty-four, she was already two years past the age at which her mother had died.

Shortly before the planned move to central Paris, however, on December 29, 1911, a feverish Marie collapsed and was taken by ambulance to a hospital. She spent the next four weeks as an inpatient, then convalesced further at home. For the first time since being named a Sorbonne professor, she was unable to teach her course. Day-to-day direction of the Curie lab fell, of necessity, to André Debierne.

It was the worst possible moment to accommodate the new chemist, Margarethe von Wrangell, but Marie had promised her a placement. Mlle. von Wrangell, a daughter of Russian nobility, had lived a cultured life of leisure in Estonia before deciding, near age thirty, to study science in Germany. Within six years at Tübingen she completed her advanced degree in chemistry, then returned to Estonia to work at an agricultural experiment station near Tartu. She arrived in Paris fresh from a formative radioactivity immersion with William Ramsay in London. But instead of receiving Mme. Curie’s personal attention, as she had expected, she continued her thorium research under the supervision of M. Debierne.

Later that winter, Marie was again hospitalized. This time she underwent surgery for the removal of kidney lesions. She emerged even weaker than before. She could not predict when she would again feel well enough to resume her teaching, her cryogenic collaboration with Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, or any of her other work. Fortunately, she had finished purifying and weighing the required quantity of radium chloride for the all-important radium standard the previous August. Her final product weighed 21.99 milligrams, or slightly more than the twenty she had promised. She sealed the material in a tiny, thin-walled glass tube, just 32 millimeters long (an inch and a quarter). The standard was now in safe keeping at the lab, where she hoped it would remain. After all, she had provided the starting material and performed the labor herself. Even if she were reimbursed for the expense, she would still wish to keep the standard near her. She had said as much to Ernest Rutherford when she saw him in Brussels at the Solvay Council in the fall. As the two of them talked privately, late into the night, she told him the simple truth: not only did she wish to monitor the standard’s activity over time, which was reason enough for holding on to it, but she also felt sentimentally attached to it. Rutherford argued convincingly that the standard could not be held in private hands. Their fellow members of the International Commission for the Radium Standard would never allow it, he said. But no formal decision had yet been reached.

“Mme. Curie is rather a difficult person to deal with,” Rutherford wrote Bertram Boltwood soon after that tête-à-tête. “She has the advantages and at the same time the disadvantages of being a woman.”

It seemed to Marie that Paris was as central a repository as could be desired for the international standard. The city was already home to the international kilogram and the international metre standards. Why should the international radium standard break with that tradition? Moreover, radioactivity researchers would have access to so-called “secondary standards,” based on the international standard and distributed around the world. She was willing to prepare the secondaries as well, just as soon as she regained her strength.

Meanwhile she bore her months of prescribed inactivity as obediently as possible. She passed hours watching the silkworms that Irène and Ève raised in glass jars on the windowsills. In a letter to her niece Hanna, who had been sent back to Warsaw on account of Aunt Manya’s illness, she said that the silkworms’ incessant industry sometimes made her fancy herself one of them. Admittedly, Marie wrote, she was not at all suited for silkworms’ work, but, like them, she always strove with determination toward a goal. Like them, she said, she had never had the least assurance of knowing her goal was true, or whether she could reach it, regardless of the effort expended. “I did those things because something obliged me to, just as the silkworm is compelled to spin its cocoon,” she told Hanna. “The poor caterpillar has no choice but to take up the task, and if she fails to complete it, she dies without metamorphosing, without recompense of any kind.” These musings led her to conclude, “Each of us must spin our own cocoon, dear Hania, without asking why, or to what end.”

BY NOW STEFAN MEYER, who served as secretary of the international commission, had produced a standard for convenient use at the Radium Institute in Vienna. Meyer’s access to the rich resources of the St. Joachimsthal uranium mine enabled him to make an in-house laboratory standard comparable in size to Mme. Curie’s international radium standard. It seemed reasonable, therefore, to arrange an actual comparison of the two. “I go over on Saturday next to Paris to take part in the comparison of the Vienna and Paris standards,” Rutherford informed Boltwood on March 18, 1912. “Mme. Curie is, I understand, not well enough to take part, but Debierne will be her representative. She was anxious to postpone the meeting, but Meyer felt that it would delay matters very much, and there was some doubt as to how long the delay would be before she could hope to attend. I have not much doubt but that the two standards will be found in very good agreement, but it will be a devil of a mess if they are not.”

Marie had known Stefan Meyer since the early days of radioactivity, when she and Pierre sent him samples of their new elements for study. Over the years he had helped her acquire several additional tons of pitchblende from St. Joachimsthal, including the material for her recently attempted spectroscopy of polonium. The last time she had seen him, at the 1910 meeting of the standards committee, she noticed that his fingertips, like hers, bore the scars of a long, close association with radium. In Meyer’s case, the damage wrought more consequential effects: he regretted he could no longer play the bass viol.

Rutherford and Meyer stopped at Mme. Curie’s apartment on the day of the comparison for an informal luncheon with her family and a few other members of the international commission. Frederick Soddy, now head of a radioactivity research group in Glasgow, came, as did Otto Hahn of Berlin and Egon von Schweidler, Meyer’s colleague at Vienna. After the meal and a short meeting, Debierne led the men to Gabriel Lippmann’s laboratory at the Sorbonne, where the two standards were compared according to their emission of gamma rays. The agreement between them proved, in Rutherford’s words, “as close as the measurements were possible within a limited time, at any rate, to 1 point in 300, and may have been closer.”

In April, seeking the curative effects of fresh air and anonymity, Marie used her sister’s name, “Mme. Dluska,” to rent a small house in the countryside. Her girls rode the train there on weekends or when school breaks allowed. In May she learned that Barbara Ayrton, daughter of her friend, physicist Hertha Ayrton, had been arrested and held at London’s Holloway Gaol for militant activism in the suffragist cause. Barbara had since been freed, but three leaders of her organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union, remained prisoners. Hertha, herself a veteran protest-marcher, implored Marie to please sign an international petition in support of their release. “I am a member of the association whose leaders are now in prison,” Hertha said in her letter, “and I know those leaders personally and look on them as persons of the utmost nobility of mind and greatness of purpose. May I hope that you, whose name is a household word among us and will command respect from the whole civilized world, will help to procure this act of justice for those who are devoting their lives to procuring the enfranchisement of women in England?”

Marie had not acted politically since leaving Poland and was at present concealing her identity from scandal-mongers and other privacy-invaders. Nevertheless she lent her name to Hertha’s cause, saying, “I have great confidence in your judgment and am convinced that your sympathies are well placed.” Moved by the suffragists’ struggle, she said she wished for their success. The petition did succeed in its immediate purpose, though voting rights still eluded the petitioners.

Bronya, Józef, and Helena had each visited Paris to support Marie through one or another of her recent difficulties. May brought other callers from Warsaw to her door: A contingent of Polish scientists tried to entice her back to her homeland. They offered her the directorship of a new radium institute, to be built for her in her native city. “Deign, most honored madame,” their official letter requested, “to transport your splendid scientific activity to our country and our capital.”

They had arrived at least two years too late. Marie could not relinquish control of the radium institute being built here in her daughters’ native city. Nor did she want to. But neither could she reject this entreaty from her countrymen, especially as it honored radium. So she accepted the new responsibility, promising to guide the institute from afar. As for the on-site direction, she delegated two assistants from the Curie lab who had Polish roots and were equal to the task, Jan Kazimierz Danysz and Ludwig Wertenstein.

In June, still unwell and pitifully thin, Marie took the healing waters at Thonon-les-Bains, in the French Alps near Lake Geneva, chaperoned by her friend Alice Chavannes. At the spa she went by the name “Mme. Sklodowska.” “I am pursuing my water cure in a tranquil place,” she wrote to Ellen Gleditsch, who had recently completed her degree and returned to Norway. “My health is improving very slowly.” Ellen sent her replies, as instructed, to the Curie lab, care of André Debierne, who forwarded Madame’s mail and guarded the secret of her whereabouts. “Unfortunately,” Marie told Ellen in a subsequent letter, “I am always in pain, and cannot write to you at length.”

Now Hertha Ayrton, who had been begging Marie for well over a year to spend a month or two with her in England, finally prevailed. Hertha boasted impeccable bona fides as a nurse: She had tended her mother, her sister, and her husband through protracted illnesses, and regularly cared for suffragists leaving prison half starved by hunger strikes. Twelve years older than Marie, she fully intended to restore her younger friend’s health by summer’s end.

Hertha chose not to host Marie at her London home in Norfolk Square, as the place was under constant police surveillance because of the militant suffragists sheltered there. Instead, Hertha met “Mme. Sklodowska” at Dover in late July and escorted her to an old Hampshire mill house she had reserved at Highcliffe-on-Sea. The place stood right on the Channel coast, with nothing but some woods between its garden and the shore. Hertha spoke fluent French, thanks to her lifelong closeness with cousins in Paris, and when Irène and Ève arrived, she found a local governess to tutor them in English. Irène, nearly fifteen and already well advanced in her language study, attempted both Dickens’s David Copperfield and Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” She also read French poetry with her mother, copying out certain verses for discussion in depth. The water at Highcliffe-on-Sea was cold for bathing, but not much colder than the sea in Brittany.

The two-month idyll afforded Hertha and Marie a rare leisure to converse about their work. Hertha maintained a physics laboratory in her home, and relied on just one assistant, a Mr. Greenslade, for her research and demonstrations. Of her several patented inventions, she was best known for eliminating the noisy hiss and flicker of the carbon arc lamps that lined London’s avenues. Hertha had successfully penetrated the Institution of Electrical Engineers, where she remained the only woman among more than three thousand men. The Royal Society, on the other hand, had refused to make her a fellow on the grounds that she was a wife. Even so, the society did award her its Hughes medal in 1906 and allowed her to present her own papers at meetings—two noteworthy female firsts.

While Marie had merely modified her given name to sound more French when she moved to France, Hertha had taken her name from the title of a poem, “Hertha” by Algernon Charles Swinburne. She believed Hertha suited her better than Phoebe, the name her parents gave her, or Sarah, the middle name by which her family had addressed her since childhood. Her husband had called her by the tender nickname B.G., for Beautiful Genius.

Hertha Ayrton in her home laboratory

Jewish Women’s Archive

The names Marie had been called in taunts spawned by the Langevin affair branded her a foreigner, a home-wrecker, and even a Jew. She was in fact Catholic, both by birth and by upbringing, but had lost her faith after her mother’s death. Hertha, who never hid the truth of her Jewish background, had likewise abandoned religious observance at an early age. Both women had struggled and sacrificed to gain a university education, and continued, each in her own way, to help other women advance. If Mrs. Ayrton felt any remorse about her illegal involvement in the fight for voting rights, it was only because she questioned the effect of her efforts. “I often think very sadly,” she wrote to one of her intimates, “that perhaps I should have been more useful to the Cause if I had devoted myself to my own special work as Madame Curie has done.”

Their time together passed pleasantly, but it did not bring Marie relief from pain. She returned to Paris still unable to take control of her laboratory. Margarethe von Wrangell, frustrated by the lack of contact with Mme. Curie, went back to Estonia and found employment at another agricultural experiment station, this time near Tallinn.

Irén Götz also left the Curie lab, partly on account of Madame’s health problems, and partly because of her own. “The illness that kept me from finishing my work in your laboratory also prevented me from thanking you in person,” she wrote from Budapest in late September. “Feeling better now, I hasten to acknowledge everything you did for me by admitting me to your laboratory, which allowed me to complete my studies and to learn things that I could not have learned anywhere else.” She had profited handsomely during her eighteen months in residence, even coauthored a report with Jan Kazimierz Danysz in Le Radium about beta radiation. Still, she rued the fact that the “regrettable circumstances of last winter” had deprived her of Madame’s unique counsel.

Viewed in a positive light, the frequent departures of female students and workers from the Curie lab translated into an increase in the number of trained women scientists employed elsewhere. Marie’s first student assistant, Eugénie Feytis, was now in Zurich, on sabbatical from Sèvres to pursue research in magnetism with Pierre Weiss at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Ellen Gleditsch was teaching the first university course in radioactivity ever offered anywhere in Norway. She had also written another of her popular magazine articles, this one a profile of Mme. Curie. Sybil Leslie, at Manchester, had impressed Rutherford enough to merit mention in one of his letters to Boltwood: “Miss Leslie is comparing accurately the diffusion constants of the thorium and actinium emanations.” Eva Ramstedt had been hired at the Nobel Institute for physics and chemistry, to work under Svante Arrhenius. Harriet Brooks had two children now, two-year-old Barbara Anne and a son, Charles Roger Pitcher, born the previous January.

By the autumn of 1912, all of the young women Marie had accepted into the Curie lab had moved on.