Chapter Twenty-Four

ÉLIANE (Polonium bis)

IN THE MARRIAGE of Irène and Frédéric, Irène was the older, better-known, and more scientifically savvy partner. Although legally now “Mme. Joliot,” she could hardly be expected to change her name, given her professional position and the number of papers she had already published under the byline of Mademoiselle Irène Curie—not to mention the aura of the Curie name in the field of radioactivity. Frédéric understood these realities as well as she did. Thus the couple’s first joint report to the Académie des Sciences, presented by physicist and family friend Jean Perrin, was coauthored by Madame Irène Curie and Monsieur Frédéric Joliot.

The early months of their married life were marred by illness. Frédéric suffered an attack of appendicitis in December 1926 and underwent surgery in January. In February, after Irène announced her pregnancy, her doctors urged her to rest—not merely because she was expecting, but because her chest X-rays showed signs of tuberculosis. Since Irène’s prescription for rest dovetailed with Frédéric’s, they quit Paris in March for Porquerolles off the Côte d’Azur.

The island was so small that one could traverse it or circle it with ease, Irène wrote Marie, but she and Fred felt so tired and lazy that they rarely went walking at all. They had not even tried to work. Instead, they “ate like horses” and gathered branches from the pine woods or driftwood on the shore to stoke the woodstove in their cozy room at the pension Sainte-Anne.

Marie replied with news of the lab, where an experiment they had left in her care was producing “devilish” results. Irène suggested that Marie “choose a good moment, in the middle of all this polonium,” to take a break and join them on Porquerolles. Frédéric, more troubled by Marie’s apparent distress at the results than by the experiment’s failure, seconded the invitation. “Permit me to intervene to insist that you join us here,” he wrote. “You must not (excuse my tone!) let yourself fall ill by refusing to rest.”

Marie found the pension and the island quite to her liking. Better yet, she saw that Irène’s lips and cheeks had turned rosy, and she showed a mother-to-be weight gain of about five kilos. “We are installed for a few days in Menton,” Marie informed Ève from one of the coastal towns they explored, “as I wrote you yesterday. I sent you a telegram, too. You must also have received the box of candied fruits shipped from Hyères. So you know I don’t forget you.”

Ève was establishing herself as a music critic, writing for several periodicals. She had bought a car and rented a studio where she could comfortably entertain friends from her world of artists, but she continued living with her mother. The situation suited them both. Ève thought Marie would be too lonely living alone, now that Irène and Frédéric had moved to their own apartment in the rue Froidevaux, and Marie thought Ève, at twenty-two, was too young to live alone.

In Paris, Irène and Frédéric came to dinner with Marie and Ève three or four times a week. On these occasions, science again dominated the conversation at table, except that now Marie and Frédéric did most of the talking, so that Irène complained she had to struggle to get a word in.

The newest face at the Curie lab belonged to Éliane Montel, a 1923 graduate of the École Normale Supérieure de jeunes filles de Sèvres. She had taken classes there with Paul Langevin, who recognized her talent and recommended her to Marie.

Madame’s first Sèvrienne, Eugénie Feytis Cotton, had at last attained her doctoral degree in physics in 1925, the same year as Irène, her former babysitting charge. By the time Eugénie, as a mother of three and head of physics instruction at Sèvres, found the time to summarize results of magnetism studies begun more than a decade earlier at the Sorbonne and in Zurich, her experiments had long since been superseded by other scientists using improved techniques. Nevertheless, her Zurich mentor, Pierre Weiss, read her thesis and suggested ways to bring it up to date. She successfully defended the revised dissertation at the University of Strasbourg, where Weiss had moved following the death of his wife. In the course of these events, Eugénie introduced the widower to her own former student, Sèvrienne Marthe Klein, one of Mme. Curie’s wartime instructors of X-ray technicians. After Marthe became the second Mme. Pierre Weiss and stepmother to his six-year-old daughter, she continued teaching physics to girls.

In the Sèvres tradition of educating women for careers in science, Éliane Montel taught at a female academy while assessing the penetration of polonium in lead at the Laboratoire Curie.

“I DON’T KNOW how the time passes,” Irène wrote to her mother in the summer of 1927. “If I didn’t have my journals and the daily arrival of the newspaper to recall me to reality, I would lose any notion of what day it is.” She felt too tired and too heavily pregnant to man the oars in a rowboat on the Brittany coast, so she and Frédéric ceded the house in l’Arcouest to Marie for the time being. The expectant couple ventured only as far as a cottage in Brunoy, just outside Paris, for their vacation.

Irène slept “like an animal in hibernation.” Frédéric fished in the river Yerres and regularly took the train to Paris to check on progress at the lab. On August 2 he found one of the staff members looking unwell. Sonia Slobodkine—Sonia Cotelle, now that she had married—was usually the most cheerful person in the whole Radium Institute, but she had endured days of stomach trouble, she told him, and had shed alarming quantities of her hair. Frédéric pressed her to leave immediately for an indefinite period of fresh-air therapy.

On hearing Fred’s account, Irène thought Sonia might have swallowed some polonium while pipetting a solution. On second thought, while recounting the incident to Marie, she deemed it equally likely that Sonia’s “present condition has no connection with polonium.” Still, Irène added, “she feels very uneasy, which is understandable.”

This was the state of cognitive dissonance in which all radioactivists lived. On the one hand, they appreciated the destructive power of the materials they handled daily. On the other hand, any worrisome symptoms they developed could be alleviated by something as simple as a brief holiday. Always the allure of the radioelements, the camaraderie of the lab, the chance of making a new discovery drew them back to work.

Irène could blame her own current fatigue on the predictable weariness of pregnancy. She gave birth on September 19, a week after her thirtieth birthday. She was the same age Marie had been when Irène herself was born. Like Marie, Irène reserved a notebook for observations about her daughter, in which she described the newborn Hélène Joliot as “a small baby, not too red, with a little blond hair,” and somewhat resembling “a young carp.” Unlike Marie, who returned to her magnetized steels within four days of her firstborn’s arrival, Irène required a lying-in period that lasted a fortnight. She left the maternity clinic well aware that she had not yet regained all her strength.

“I ARRIVED IN BRUSSELS without mishap,” Marie wrote Ève on October 25, at the start of the fifth Solvay Council, “a little tired, naturally, and found here the most brilliant company from the scientific point of view.” The group of thirty included Albert Einstein, Max Planck, and Niels Bohr. “I take such great pleasure in speaking of new things with all these lovers of physics.”

At the first Solvay gathering, sixteen years before, Planck’s quantum—the packaging of energy into discrete bundles—had been a novelty, at odds with every tenet of classical physics. By 1927 the quantum had become a pillar of science, and had cleaved the universe into two seemingly irreconcilable halves. In the familiar realm, molecules and organisms were held together by chemical bonds and electromagnetic force, and obeyed the same law of gravity that controlled the motions of planets and stars. But different rules and forces prevailed in the subatomic domain, where waves could behave like particles, and particles behaved like waves. New math had been necessary to explicate the atom, and the mathematicians who met that need—Louis de Broglie, Erwin Schrödinger, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli—were all present in Brussels for these discussions.

Marie, still the council’s only female physics insider, had kept up with recent developments. She presented remarks she had prepared in advance regarding experiments by Arthur Holly Compton of the University of Chicago, one of the youthful new attendees. Just as the alpha and beta “rays” of radioactivity had turned out to be tangible particles, namely helium nuclei and electrons, light rays, too, according to Compton, could be resolved into discrete particles. He had demonstrated that when a quantum of light energy, or “photon,” struck an electron, the two rebounded like colliding billiard balls.

Conversations devoted to “Electrons and Photons” quickly escalated to debate. Hendrik Lorentz, who had presided over every council since the first one in 1911, strove to maintain order, but often several participants called out at once in their excitement, and in their own languages. Arguments between Einstein and Bohr over the interpretation of quantum theory spilled out of the conference room into the city streets, often carrying on through the dinner hour and late into the night.

Soon after Marie got home from this rarefied fray, she learned that Irène’s Japanese protégé, Nobuo Yamada, had died in Tokyo on the first of November. Tokyo Imperial University, the letter said, had promoted the thirty-one-year-old Yamada to the rank of full professor while he lay unconscious in the final weeks of his life. Doctors attributed his death to a brain tumor.

Although Yamada had encountered every type of radiation in the Curie lab, his two years of exposure could not be conclusively linked to his illness or death. A preexisting or otherwise unrelated problem might have been to blame. Irène’s own ongoing fatigue and anemia, however, were becoming harder to explain away.

“Irène doesn’t feel well yet,” Marie wrote her brother, Józef, in early December. “She still doesn’t have enough erythrocytes [red blood cells]. She will be leaving soon for two weeks of winter sports, and hopes that this stay in the mountains will be good for her anemia.”

In January, before Irène set off with Frédéric for the Alps, news broke of a new court case concerning luminous-dial painters in the United States. Five sick and dying young women claimed that the practice of putting radium-laced paintbrushes in their mouths had ravaged their bodies. They were suing the U.S. Radium Corporation for help with the extraordinary medical expenses they incurred on account of their unique disabilities. In addition to the “radium jaw” that allegedly caused their teeth to fall out, they sustained other bone destruction in their feet, knees, hips, and back, treatable only by orthopedic braces and surgery.

Reporters contacted the discoverer of radium for comment. Mme. Curie believed the women deserved compassion, justice, and compensation. “I would be only too happy to give any aid that I could,” she said. Regrettably, however, “there is absolutely no means of destroying the substance once it enters the human body.” She meant there was no way to remove it from the victims’ bodies. Radium could not be destroyed by any means other than its own self-destruction, at a pace so slow as to far outlast any human lifetime.