DEAR HENRIETTA,” Manya wrote to her cousin Michalovska on December 10, 1885, “since we separated my existence has been that of a prisoner. As you know, I found a place with the B—–’s, a family of lawyers. I shouldn’t like my worst enemy to live in such a hell. In the end, my relations with Mme B—– had become so icy that I could not endure it any longer and told her so. Since she was exactly as enthusiastic about me as I was about her, we understood each other marvelously well.
“It was one of those rich houses where they speak French when there is company—a chimney-sweeper’s kind of French—where they don’t pay their bills for six months, and where they fling money out of the window even though they economize pettily on oil for the lamps. They have five servants. They pose as liberals and, in reality, they are sunk in the darkest stupidity. And last of all, although they speak in the most sugary tones, slander and scandal rage through their talk—slander which leaves not a rag on anybody … I learned to know the human race a little better by being there. I learned that the characters described in novels really do exist, and that one must not enter into contact with people who have been demoralized by wealth.”
The picture is without indulgence. Coming from a creature so devoid of malice, it suggests how naïve and full of illusions was Manya. In placing herself with a well-to-do Polish family chosen by hazard she had had the hope of finding pleasant children and understanding parents. She was ready to attach herself and to love. Her disappointment was severe.
The letters the young governess was to write make us feel, indirectly, the distinction of the environment she had been obliged to leave. In her circle of intellectuals Manya had met people of small ability, but she had scarcely ever seen any of low or calculating spirit, any without honor. She had never heard an ugly or vulgar word at home. Family quarrels or spiteful chatter would have inspired horror in the Sklodovski household. Every time the girl met with stupidity, pettiness or vulgarity, we can perceive her astonishment and revolt.
Strange paradox: the high quality of Manya’s youthful companions and their lively intelligence may be taken as explaining the secret of a haunting enigma. How was it that nobody discovered the extraordinary vocation, the genius, of this young girl? Why had she not been sent to study in Paris, instead of being allowed to seek employment as a governess?
Living among exceptional beings, with three young people who carried off diplomas and medals, who were brilliant, ambitious and ardent for work like herself, the future Marie Curie did not seem remarkable. In an intellectually narrow circle, surprising gifts are soon shown; they provoke astonishment and comment; but here, under the same roof, Joseph, Bronya, Hela and Manya were all growing up, rivaling one another in aptitude for knowledge. Thus it came about that nobody—neither the old nor the young—recognized in one of these children the signs of a great mind; nobody was touched by its first radiations. There was no suspicion that Manya might be of a different essence from her brother and sisters, and she had no idea of it herself.
When she compared herself to her relatives her modesty approached humility. But in the middle-class families to which her new profession introduced her there was no disguising her superiority. This was evident even to Manya’s own eyes, and she became aware of it with some pleasure. The girl counted the privileges of birth and wealth as nothing; envy was never to touch her; but she was proud of her origin and of the training she had received. Through the judgments which we shall see her pass upon her employers there pierces the point of scorn and of an innocent pride.
Philosophical instruction on the human race, or upon “people demoralized by wealth,” was not the only sort Manya received from her first experience. She learned that the plan once explained to Bronya needed serious revision.
Manya had hoped, by taking a place in Warsaw, to earn respectable sums of money without condemning herself to painful exile. To remain in the city was a mitigation of the sentence: it meant staying near home and being able to go every day and talk for a bit with her father. It meant keeping up contact with her friends of the Floating University and being able—perhaps—to attend a few evening courses.
But those who have the taste for sacrifice within them cannot stop at half-immolations. The lot the young girl had chosen was still not arid enough: she could not earn enough money, and above all she spent too much. Her salary, frittered away in little daily purchases, left her with insignificant savings at the end of the month. She had yet to prepare herself to subsidize Bronya, who had gone to Paris with Marya Rakovska and was living in poverty in the Latin Quarter. And then, too, M. Sklodovski’s retirement was drawing near. Soon the old man would need help. What was she to do?
Manya did not hesitate for long. She had heard of a good post as governess in the country two or three weeks ago. No sooner said than done. She would accept the distant province, the leap into the unknown. It would be years of separation from those she loved, total isolation. What did that matter? The salary was good, and in that forgotten village the expenses were reduced practically to nothing.
“And I love the open air so much!” Manya told herself. “Why didn’t I think of it sooner?”
She informed her cousin of her decision:
I shall not be free long, for I have decided, after some hesitation, to accept a place in the country tomorrow to begin in January. It is in the Government of Plock, and pays five hundred rubles a year dating from the first of January. It is the same post that was suggested to me some time ago, which I let slip. The family are not satisfied with their governess and now they are asking for me. It is quite possible, for that matter, that I shall please them no better than the other one.
The first of January 1886, the day of her departure for the journey in the dreary cold, was to remain one of the cruelest dates of Manya’s existence. She had bravely said good-by to her father. She had repeated her new address for him:
Mlle Marya Sklodovska,
In Care of M. and Mme Z.,
Szczuki,
Near Przasnysz.
She had climbed into the railway carriage. For one more moment she could see the stocky outline of the professor, for one more moment she smiled. Then suddenly, as she sat down on the bench in the carriage, she felt the pressure of solitude. Alone—she was all alone, for the first time in her life.
The girl of eighteen was abruptly seized by panic. In the train which was carrying her heavily toward a strange house and family Manya shivered with shyness and terror. Supposing her new employers were like the old ones? Suppose M. Sklodovski were to fall ill in her absence? Would she ever see him again? Had she not done a thoroughly foolish thing? Torturing questions assailed the girl as she crouched near the window of the compartment looking out through her tears—she dried them with her hand, but they always came back—at vast plains hushed beneath the snow in the falling day.
Three hours in the train were followed by four hours in a sleigh over very straight roads in the majestic silence of winter night. M. and Mme Z., estate administrators, farmed part of the lands of the Princes Czartoryski, one hundred kilometers north of Warsaw. When she arrived at the door of their house on an icy night Manya, broken with fatigue, could barely see, as in a dream, the great stature of the master of the household, his wife’s dim face, and the intense stares of the children fixed upon her with sparkling curiosity.
The governess was received with hot tea and friendly words. Then, going up to the first floor, Mme Z. showed Manya her room and left her there in the company of her poor luggage.
Manya to her cousin Henrietta, February 3, 1886:
I have now been with M. and Mme Z. for one month; so I have had time to acclimatize myself in the new post. Up to now all has gone well. The Z.’s are excellent people. I have made friends with their eldest daughter, Bronka, which contributes to the pleasantness of my life. As for my pupil, Andzia, who will soon be ten, she is an obedient child, but very disorderly and spoiled. Still, one can’t require perfection.…
In this part of the country nobody works; people think only of amusing themselves; and since we in this house keep a little apart from the general dance, we are the talk of the countryside. One week after my arrival they were already speaking of me unfavorably because, as I didn’t know anybody, I refused to go to a ball at Karvacz, the gossip center of the region. I was not sorry, for M. and Mme Z. came back from that ball at one o’clock the next afternoon. I was glad to have escaped such a test of endurance, especially as I am not feeling at all strong just now.
There was a ball here on Twelfth Night. I was treated to the sight of a certain number of guests worthy of the caricaturist’s pencil, and enjoyed myself hugely. The young people here are most uninteresting. Some of the girls are so many geese who never open their mouths, the others are highly provocative. It appears that there are some others, more intelligent. But up to now my Bronka (Mlle Z.) seems to me a rare pearl both in her good sense and in her understanding of life.
I have seven hours of work a day: four with Andzia, three with Bronka. This is rather a lot, but it doesn’t matter. My room is upstairs. It is big, quiet and agreeable. There is a whole collection of children in the Z. family: three sons in Warsaw (one at the university, two in boarding schools). In the house there are Bronka (eighteen years old), Andzia (ten), Stas who is three, and Maryshna, a little girl of six months. Stas is very funny. His nyanya told him God was everywhere. And he, with his little face agonized, asked: “Is he going to catch me? Will he bite me?” He amuses us all enormously.
Manya interrupted her letter, put her pen down on the writing desk she had installed near the long window, and braving the cold in her woollen dress, went out on the balcony. The view offered her there still had the gift of making her laugh. Wasn’t it comic to set out for an isolated country house, imagining rural landscapes in advance, with prairies and forests, and then, on opening the casement of her room for the first time, to perceive a tall, aggressive factory chimney which, shutting off and dirtying the sky, spat opaque plumes of black smoke?
There was not a field or a coppice for miles around: nothing but sugar beet and again sugar beet, filling the great monotonous plain. In the autumn these pale earthy beet roots, piled up in bullock carts, slowly converged on the factory to be made into sugar. The peasants sowed, hoed and reaped for the factory. The huts of the little village of Krasiniec were crowded near these dreary red brick buildings. And the river itself was the slave of the factory, entering limpid and departing soiled, its surface charged with a dark, sticky scum.
Monsieur Z., an agriculturist of repute, familiar with new techniques, controlled the farming of two hundred acres of beet root. He was a wealthy man: he owned a great part of the shares in the sugar factory. And in his house, as in the others, the factory was the object of preoccupation.
There was nothing on the grand scale about this. The factory, however absorbing it seemed, was only an enterprise of average importance like dozens of others in the provinces. The Szczuki estate was small: two hundred acres, in that country of vast estates, are nothing. The Z.’s were well off but not rich. And although their house was more attractive than the neighboring farms it would be impossible, with the best will in the world, to call it a château. It was a rather old-fashioned villa, one of those great low buildings with sloped roofs overhanging walls of dull stucco, pergolas covered with Virginia creeper and verandas all glassed in and full of draughts.
One concession only was made to beauty: the pleasure garden, which became very pretty in summer with its lawn, its shrubbery and its croquet ground sheltered by a row of well-cut ash trees. On the other side of the house there was an orchard, and farther on the four red roofs of the barns, stables and cattle sheds where forty horses and sixty cows were lodged. Beyond that, as far as the horizon, was nothing but loam for beet root.
“Well, I haven’t done so badly,” Manya told herself as she shut the window. “The factory isn’t beautiful, certainly. But just the same it’s because of it that this provincial hole is a little more animated than some others. People often come from Warsaw and others go there. There are engineers and directors at the sugar factory; that is pleasant enough. One can borrow books and reviews there. Mme Z. has a bad temper, but she is not at all a bad woman. If she doesn’t always treat me, the governess, with tact, that’s no doubt because she was once a governess herself, and fortune came to her a bit too quickly. Her husband is charming, her elder daughter is an angel, her children are tolerable. I ought to think myself very lucky.”
After warming her hands before the immense stove in shining porcelain which filled one of the alcoves of the room from floor to ceiling, Manya went back to her correspondence—until such time as an imperious call, “Mademoiselle Marya!” might inform her, through walls and doors, that her employers had need of her.
A governess all alone might be expected to write many letters, if only to receive answers with news from the town. As the weeks and months went by, at regular intervals Manya gave her relatives an account of the various events of her existence, in which humble tasks alternated with hours of “company” and pleasures which were part of her work. She wrote to her father, to Joseph and to Hela; to her dear Bronya; to Kazia Przyborovska, her school friend. To her cousin Henrietta, who was now married and living in Lvov but had remained a fierce “positivist,” she freely confided some graver reflections: her discouragement and her hope:
Manya to Henrietta, April 5, 1886:
I am living as it is customary to live in my position. I give my lessons and I read a little, but it isn’t easy, for the arrival of new guests constantly upsets the normal employment of my time. Sometimes this irritates me a great deal, since my Andzia is one of those children who profit enthusiastically by every interruption of work, and there is no way of bringing her back to reason afterwards. Today we had another scene because she did not want to get up at the usual hour. In the end I was obliged to take her calmly by the hand and pull her out of bed. I was boiling inside. You can’t imagine what such little things do to me: such a piece of nonsense can make me ill for several hours. But I had to get the better of her.…
… Conversation in company? Gossip and then more gossip. The only subjects of discussion are the neighbors, dances and parties. So far as dancing is concerned, you could look far before you would find better dancers than the young girls of this region. They all dance perfectly. They are not bad creatures, for that matter, and certain ones are even intelligent, but their education has done nothing to develop their minds, and the stupid, incessant parties here have ended by frittering their wits away. As for the young men, there are few nice ones who are even a bit intelligent … For the girls and boys alike, such words as “positivism” or “the labor question” are objects of aversion—supposing they have ever heard the words, which is unusual. The Z. household is relatively cultivated. M. Z. is an old-fashioned man, but full of good sense, sympathetic and reasonable. His wife is rather difficult to live with, but when one knows how to take her she is quite nice. I think she likes me well enough.
If you could only see my exemplary conduct! I go to church every Sunday and holiday, without ever pleading a headache or a cold to get out of it. I hardly ever speak of higher education for women. In a general way I observe, in my talk, the decorum suitable to my position.
At Easter I am going to Warsaw for a few days. Everything inside me so leaps with joy at the thought that I have difficulty restraining wild cries of happiness.…
It was all very well for ironic Manya to describe her “exemplary conduct,” but there was a daring and original character in her which could not long tolerate the conventional life. The “positive idealist” was always there, eager to be useful, to fight.
One day when she met some little peasants in the muddy road, boys and girls miserably dressed, with bold faces under their hempen hair, Manya conceived a plan. Why should she not put into practice, in this small world of Szczuki, those progressive ideas which were so dear to her? Last year she had dreamed of “enlightening the people.” Here was an excellent opportunity. The village children were for the most part illiterate. If any of them had been to school at any time, they had only learned the Russian alphabet there. How fine it would be to create a secret course in Polish, to awaken these young brains to the beauty of the national language and history!
The governess submitted her idea to Mlle Z., who was immediately taken with it and decided to assist.
“Think it over carefully,” said Manya, to calm her enthusiasm. “You know that if we are denounced we shall be sent to Siberia.”
But nothing is more contagious than courage: in the eyes of Bronka Z., Manya saw ardor and resolution. There was only the authorization of the head of the family to be obtained, and they could begin their discreet propaganda in the peasant huts.
Manya to Henrietta, September 3, 1886:
… I could have had a holiday this summer, but I didn’t know where to go, so I stayed at Szczuki. I did not want to spend the money to go to the Carpathians. I have many hours of lessons with Andzia, I read with Bronka, and I work an hour a day with the son of a workman here, whom I am preparing for school. Besides this, Bronka and I give lessons to some peasant children for two hours a day. It is a class, really, for we have ten pupils. They work with a very good will, but just the same our task is sometimes difficult. What consoles me is that the results get better gradually, or even quite quickly. Thus I have pretty full days—and I also teach myself a little or a lot, working alone.…
Manya to Henrietta, December 1886:
… The number of my peasant pupils is now eighteen. Naturally they don’t all come together, as I couldn’t manage it, but even as it is they take two hours a day. On Wednesdays and Saturdays I am with them a little longer—as many as five hours consecutively. Of course this is only possible because my room is on the first floor and has a separate entrance on the stairway to the courtyard—thus, since this work doesn’t keep me from my obligations to the Z.’s, I disturb nobody. Great joys and great consolations come to me from these little children.…
Thus it was not enough for Manya to listen to Andzia droning out her lessons, to work with Bronka and to keep Julek—who was back from Warsaw and had been turned over to her—from going to sleep over his books. When all that was done, the dauntless girl went up to her room and waited until a noise of boots on the stairs, mingling with the shuffle of bare feet, announced the arrival of her disciples. She had borrowed a pine table and some chairs so that they could practice their writing comfortably. She had taken enough from her savings to buy them some copybooks and the pens which the numbed little fingers managed with such difficulty. When seven or eight young peasants were installed in the big room with chalked walls, Manya and Bronka Z. were barely able to maintain order and rescue the unhappy pupils who, sniffling and snorting with anguish, could not spell a difficult word.
These sons and daughters of servants, farmers and factory workers, who pressed round Manya’s dark dress and fair hair, were not always well washed. They did not smell nice. Some of them were inattentive and sullen. But in most of their bright eyes appeared a naïve and violent desire to accomplish, someday, those fabulous acts: reading and writing. And when this humble end was achieved, when the big black letters on white paper suddenly took on meaning, the young girl’s heart contracted at the noisy, prideful triumph of the children and the wondering admiration of their illiterate parents who sometimes stationed themselves at the end of the room to watch the lessons. She thought of all this good will wasted, and of the gifts that perhaps lay hidden in these balked and defrauded creatures. Before their sea of ignorance she felt disarmed and feeble.