Chapter Nineteen

LÉONIE (Oxygen)

MME. CURIE CREATED the novel position of laboratory secretary expressly for Léonie Razet. The young Parisian widow had lost her husband during the recent war, though not to enemy fire. Jean Pierre Razet, a radioactivist who had collaborated over the years with the Curies, with Émile Armet de Lisle, and also with Jacques Danne, was unable to serve in the army because of a pulmonary ailment. He passed the early part of the war helping to dismantle the old Curie lab and set up the new one in the Institut du Radium, then died of his illness in December 1916, at age thirty-two, leaving Léonie the sole support of their daughters—Suzanne, eight, and Yvonne, five.

Léonie learned quickly to distinguish between matters that merited Madame’s personal attention and duties she could discharge by herself. She took over the flow of international correspondence that had begun in the first blush of the radium craze, when an American admirer had tried to give a racehorse Mme. Curie’s name. Nowadays the mail brought frequent invitations to lecture at foreign universities about radioactivity, to teach X-ray courses abroad for nurses and technicians, and to visit the sites of promising mine deposits or mineral waters. Some writers pleaded for medical advice, while others simply wanted the famous scientist’s autograph. Quite a few sought employment. To those applicants who lacked qualifications or trusted referrals Léonie sent neatly typed regrets. In midsummer of 1919, however, when a letter from Ellen Gleditsch suggested a candidate for the coming academic year, Mme. Curie handwrote her own positive reply.

Léonie collected a few biographical details about fellow members of the laboratory staff, and recorded them, along with brief descriptions of each one’s responsibilities. These personnel files—a slim data set at Léonie’s start date in 1918—grew in September 1919 to include twenty-five-year-old Renée Galabert, from Chartres, and twenty-three-year-old Sonia Slobodkine, a native of Warsaw who had just completed chemistry studies at the Sorbonne. Renée assisted Madeleine Monin in the measurement of radium and thorium products sent to the Curie lab for certification. Sonia took up the pre-purification chemical treatment of new radioactive sources.

Ellen Gleditsch returned in October with her protégée Randi Holwech, a graduate of the Norwegian Institute of Technology. Ellen had described her to Madame as “intelligent, gifted, and personable,” with a demonstrated proficiency in measuring radioactivity. Randi also spoke fluent French, allowing her to engage immediately with her new associates, whereas Ellen had struggled to learn the language during her initiation into the Curie lab.

Aside from the few familiar faces of long acquaintance, Ellen saw little at the grand new institute to evoke the old lab in the Annex. Those small, overcrowded rooms, inconveniently separated by a courtyard, had paved the way to a well-designed building of stately proportions. Remarkably, the structure of the Curie Pavilion had sustained no damage from bombs or bullets, and yet the effects of the war all but echoed through the spacious halls. It would take time for the country to recover from its losses, let alone for scientific work to regain its prewar momentum.

Madame, worn down by travail and now fifty-two years old, conceded that the constant handling of radium occasionally caused her “discomfort.” She was careful in the new lab to shield radioactive sources with lead—a precaution that had never crossed her mind in the days of the shed. Special screens now protected lab workers from stray radiation, and modern draft hoods carried off noxious gases. She could banish periods of “discomfort” by spending a few days away, though the dimming of her eyesight by cataracts and the humming in her ears persisted. While at work, she often stepped outdoors on the rear balcony for a breath of fresh air, and urged those around her to do the same. The balcony overlooked the rose garden. One might stand out there for a few minutes, surveying the pleasant scenery, or descend to ground level, where tables and chairs set among the flower beds invited scientists from the Laboratoire Curie to socialize with physicians from the Pavillon Pasteur.

Dr. Claudius Regaud, who had been visiting cancer patients at several clinics of the Assistance Publique, now delivered curiethérapie at two newly designated cancer wards, each with about twenty beds, situated in two Paris hospitals. He and Mme. Curie believed an additional dispensary belonged on the grounds of—or adjacent to—the Institut du Radium. In 1920 they established a foundation, the Fondation Curie, to accept donations and advance their plans for furthering research while treating disease with radiation.

Radium’s rarity had assumed added significance with the recent increase in medical demand. The radium in Mme. Curie’s lab supplied not only the physicochemical investigations under her direction but also the basic biological research on Dr. Regaud’s side of the institute. And it generated the emanation prized in cancer treatment. The lab’s all-important Emanation Service regularly gathered precise quantities of radium-emitted gas to be encapsulated in tiny glass or platinum needles of various shapes and sizes for therapeutic insertion into any part of the human body. “Technical considerations make the employment of emanation preferable to the direct use of radium,” Madame explained. Each vial came with a numerical chart that told the physician “how much of this emanation has disappeared each day, despite the fact that it is cloistered in its little glass prison.”

IN MAY 1920, when an American reporter for women’s magazines named Marie Mattingly Meloney got around Léonie Razet to gain an audience with Mme. Curie, the scarcity of radium dominated their conversation. “I waited a few minutes in a bare little office which might have been furnished from Grand Rapids, Michigan,” Mrs. Meloney later recalled. “Then the door opened and I saw a pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face I had ever looked upon.”

Marie was just back from a round of lectures and teaching in Madrid, where she had met King Alfonso XIII and his mother, Queen Maria Christina. She received Mrs. Meloney cordially.

“Her well-formed hands were rough,” the reporter observed. “I noticed a characteristic, nervous little habit of rubbing the tips of her fingers over the pad of her thumb in quick succession. I learned later that working with radium had made them numb.”

Having finally succeeded at meeting the long-sought object of her admiration, Mrs. Meloney struggled to match the real Mme. Curie with the preconceptions she had brought to the interview: “I had been prepared to meet a woman of the world, enriched by her own efforts and established in one of the white palaces of the Champs-Élysées or some other beautiful boulevard of Paris.” Instead, “I found a simple woman, working in an inadequate laboratory and living in a simple apartment on the meager pay of a French professor.” This discovery unhinged Mrs. Meloney. “Suddenly I felt like an intruder. I was struck dumb. My timidity exceeded her own. I had been a trained interrogator for twenty years, but I could not ask a single question of this gentle woman in a black cotton dress.” Mme. Curie filled the awkward pause by naming the American cities where rich troves of radium resided—four grams in Baltimore, six in Denver, seven in New York, and so on. The Curie lab, in contrast, had one. Its market value, Mrs. Meloney learned, was $100,000.

“I also learned that Madame Curie’s laboratory, although practically a new building, was without sufficient equipment; that the radium held there was used at that time only for extracting emanations for hospital use in cancer treatment.” This seems an exaggeration, or at least a misunderstanding. Nevertheless, after two subsequent encounters, one at the institute and one at the Curie apartment on the quai de Béthune, Mrs. Meloney vowed to procure a second gram of radium with the aid of the women of America, “and in this way to enable Madame Curie to go on with her work.”

CONTINUING HER TOUR of inspection as envoy of the Royal Frederick University’s laboratory planning committee, Ellen Gleditsch left Paris for England in the spring of 1920. Her friends Eva Ramstedt and Sybil Leslie met her in Oxford. “It’s the first time we are together since 1911, when we all worked in your laboratory,” they told Mme. Curie via postcard. “We think of you, talk about you, and with our good memories we send our admiration and greetings.”

The trio then visited Frederick Soddy in his new lab at Oxford University. Soddy had spent his undergraduate years at Oxford, before heading to McGill, where he and Ernest Rutherford uncovered “the new alchemy” of radioactive transmutation that made their reputations. His current mission at Oxford was to build a research school in radioactivity, as he had done successfully in Glasgow and Aberdeen. But he apologized for having so little to show his guests. His work had been interrupted by the war, he said, also by moving, and it would be a while before he could get things up and running.

Rutherford, too, had recently returned to his roots, leaving Manchester to direct the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University, where he had apprenticed under J. J. Thomson. The “old place,” as he fondly viewed the Cavendish, was very congested now, with naval officers as well as researchers, and he meant to enlarge it.

Ellen sailed home in October 1920 to yet another accolade for her scientific achievements. The Fridtjof Nansen Prize, named for the great Norwegian polar explorer and oceanographer, was nearly as old as the Nobel Prize. The Nansen Trust presented the award annually in both the literary arts and the natural sciences, but it had never before recognized a woman as a winner in either category.

Distinguished and decorated, Ellen, now forty, resumed her teaching and research at the university. Her youngest sibling, Kristian, had moved to Trondheim to study civil engineering at the Norwegian Institute of Technology, but her brother Adler, a maker of topographic maps, still lived with her.

In November, Ellen and her only female colleague on the faculty, Kristine Bonnevie, formed a local branch of a fledgling sisterhood known as the International Federation of University Women. The organization had been conceived just after the war, in the hope that educated women could help prevent another such catastrophe by nurturing global friendships. The IFUW particularly appealed to Ellen because it counted the creation of fellowships for study abroad among its main goals. “Women who have had such experiences will come home to their country with the most valuable of all gifts,” she predicted, namely “a decision to continue their research.”

Ellen’s Curie-lab friend Eva Ramstedt agreed, and started a Swedish IFUW chapter in Stockholm. In Quebec, Harriet Brooks Pitcher took an immediate interest in the IFUW. Already active in the McGill Alumnae Association and a charter member of the Women’s Canadian Club of Montreal—and having traveled twice to Europe on scholarships—she joined the federation’s Canadian branch.

Harriet had last seen her mentor Ernest Rutherford in 1914, on his way back from a family reunion in New Zealand and the British Association meeting in Australia. On that occasion, Mary Rutherford and thirteen-year-old daughter Eileen had stayed at Harriet’s home for several days while “Ern” tended to business at the University Club. Harriet still exchanged family-news notes with Mary, but the only letters she saw from Sir Ernest were the ones printed in the columns of newspapers and journals. On December 8, 1920, for example, in the midst of a Cambridge debate about granting women degrees and other privileges long reserved for men only, Rutherford and chemist William Pope aired their opinion in the Times.

“For our part,” the men stated jointly, “we welcome the presence of women in our laboratories on the ground that residence in this University is intended to fit the rising generation to take its proper place in the outside world, where, to an ever increasing extent, men and women are being called upon to work harmoniously side by side in every department of human affairs.”

In this climate of shared optimism and commitment to a peaceful future, Mme. Curie carefully considered the part that she would play. Numerous groups invited her participation or at least her signature on a declaration. Rather than ally herself with the IFUW in France, she agreed—along with Albert Einstein, Hendrik Lorentz, Kristine Bonnevie, and others—to be inducted into the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, an advisory arm of the new League of Nations. It was hoped that the brightest lights in the arts and sciences, by pooling their gifts, could envision a peaceful world and map a path to its realization.