YES, MARIE’S EXISTENCE had still further to be despoiled and made bare. The few months she had lived in the Rue d’Allemagne had been a stage in acclimatization. Now the girl sank slowly into solitude. The beings she rubbed elbows with existed for her no more than the walls she touched in passing, and conversation hardly cut in upon the silence in which she enveloped her hours. For more than three solid years she was to lead a life devoted to study alone: a life in conformity with her dreams, a “perfect” life in the sense in which that of the monk or the missionary is perfect.
Her life had to be of monastic simplicity in any case: for since Marie had voluntarily deprived herself of the board and lodging she had had at the Dluskis’, she had to meet her expenses herself. And her income—made up by her own savings, divided into slices, and the small sums her father could send her—resolved itself into forty rubles a month.
How could a woman, a foreigner, live decently in Paris in 1892 with forty rubles a month, three francs a day, paying for her own room, meals, clothes, paper and books, as well as her fees at the university? Such was the problem the young student had urgently to solve. But Marie never failed to find the solution of a problem.
Manya to her brother Joseph, March 17, 1892:
You have no doubt learned from Father that I decided to live nearer to the schools, as it had become necessary for several reasons, above all for the present quarter. The plan is now realized: I am writing to you, in fact, from my new lodging, 3 Rue Flatters. It is a little room, very suitable, and nevertheless very cheap. In a quarter of an hour I can be in the chemistry laboratory, in twenty minutes at the Sorbonne. Naturally, without the Dluskis’ help I should never have been able to arrange things like this.
I am working a thousand times as hard as at the beginning of my stay: in the Rue d’Allemagne my little brother-in-law had the habit of disturbing me endlessly. He absolutely could not endure having me do anything but engage in agreeable chatter with him when I was at home. I had to declare war on him on this subject. After a few days Bronya and he began to feel badly about me, and they came to see me. We drank tea, bachelor fashion, and then we went downstairs to see the S.’s, who also live here.
Is your wife taking care of Father, as she promised me? Let her take care, just the same, not to cut me out altogether at home! Father is beginning to speak of her a little too tenderly, and I am afraid that he will be forgetting me soon.…
Marie was not the only student who lived on a hundred francs a month in the Latin Quarter: most of her Polish comrades were as poor as she was. Some lived by threes or fours in the same lodging and took their meals together; others, who lived alone, devoted several hours a day to housekeeping, cooking and sewing, and by sheer ingenuity ate as much as they wanted, shod and clothed themselves in greater or lesser elegance. This was the method adopted earlier by Bronya, whose talents as a prize cook had been celebrated among her comrades.
Marie disdained to follow such wise examples. She was too fond of her tranquillity to share her lodging with a friend or two. She was too haunted by work to bother about her own comfort. Even if she had wished to do so, for that matter, she would have been incapable of it: the girl who had been a governess in strange families at seventeen, giving seven or eight hours of lessons a day, had never found time or occasion for learning how to keep house. Everything that Bronya had learned when she was mistress of her father’s house was unknown to Marie. And the report had it, in the Polish colony, that “Mademoiselle Sklodovska doesn’t know what you use to make soup.”
She did not know, and she did not want to know. Why should she pass a morning initiating herself into the mysteries of a broth, when she might have been learning several pages of physics, or making an interesting analysis in the laboratory?
By deliberate intention she had suppressed diversions from her schedule, as well as friendly meetings and contact with human beings. In the same way she decided that material life had no importance; that it did not exist. And, fortified by this principle, she made for herself a Spartan existence, strange and inhuman.
Rue Flatters, Boulevard Port-Royal, Rue des Feuillantines.… All the rooms Marie was to inhabit were alike in discomfort and cheapness of rent. The first was situated in a poorly furnished house where students, doctors and officers of the neighboring garrison lived. Later on the girl, in search of absolute calm, was to take an attic like a servant’s room at the top of a middle-class house. For fifteen or twenty francs a month she found a tiny nook which obtained light from a loophole giving directly on the slope of the roof. Through this skylight appeared a small square of the sky. There was no heat, no lighting, no water.
Marie furnished this place with all the objects she possessed: an iron folding bed, the mattress she had brought from Poland, a stove, a white wooden table, a kitchen chair, a washbasin; a petroleum oil lamp, covered by a twopenny shade; a pitcher which she had to fill at the tap on the landing; an alcohol heater about as big as a saucer, which was to cook her meals for the next three years; two plates, a knife, a fork, a spoon, a cup, a stewpan; and finally a kettle and three glasses into which, according to Polish custom, the student would pour tea when the Dluskis came to see her. On the occasions—very rare at present—when Marie received visitors, the rights of hospitality were asserted: the girl lighted the little stove, whose zigzag pipe described complicated angles in the room. And for a seat she pulled out of its corner the bulging brown trunk which served her as wardrobe and chest of drawers.
No service, of course: even one hour of cleaning a day would have overweighted the expense side of the budget. Transportation costs were suppressed: Marie went to the Sorbonne on foot in all weathers. Coal was kept down to a minimum: one or two sacks of “lumps” for the winter, which the girl bought from the merchant on the corner and hoisted up the steep stairs herself to the sixth floor, bucketful by bucketful, stopping at each floor to breathe. Lights were at a minimum: as soon as night fell, the student took refuge in that blessed asylum called the Library of Sainte-Geneviève, where the gas was lighted and it was warm. Seated at one of the big rectangular tables with her head in her hands, a poor Polish girl could work until they closed the doors at ten o’clock. From then on all that was needed was enough petroleum to keep the light going in her room until two in the morning. Then, with her eyes reddened by fatigue, Marie left her books and threw herself on the bed.
The only thing she knew how to do, in the humble practical domain, was to sew—a memory of the “manual training” at the Sikorski boarding school, and of the long days in Szczuki when the governess, as she supervised the children’s study, took up her sewing.… It would be rash to conclude from this that the exile ever, by chance, bought a bit of stuff at a low price and made herself a new blouse. She seems to have sworn, on the contrary, never to give up her Warsaw dresses, and wore them, shiny, old-fashioned and threadbare, forever. But she took great care of her clothes, cleaned them and mended them. She also condescended to wash her linen in a basin when she was too tired to work and needed relaxation.
Marie did not admit that she could be cold or hungry. In order not to buy coal—and through sheer carelessness too—she often neglected to light the little stove with the twisted pipe, and she wrote figures and equations without noticing that her fingers were getting numb and her shoulders shaking. A hot soup or a bit of meat would have comforted her; but Marie did not know how to make soup. Marie could not spend a franc and lose a half hour to cook herself a chop. She hardly ever entered the butcher’s shop, and even less the restaurant: it was too dear. For weeks at a time she ate nothing but buttered bread and tea. When she wanted a feast, she went into a creamery in the Latin Quarter and ate two eggs, or else bought herself a piece of chocolate or some fruit.
On this diet the fresh, solid girl who had left Warsaw a few months before rapidly grew anaemic. Often, as she was getting up from her table, her head would go round. She had just time to get to her bed when she would lose consciousness. Coming back to herself, she would ask why she had fainted; she would think herself ill and disdain her illness as she did everything else. It never occurred to her that she was dropping with weakness and that her only disease was that of starvation.
Naturally, she did not boast of this superb organization of existence to the Dluskis. Every time she went to see them she replied in monosyllables to their questions on her progress as a cook, or on her daily menus. If her brother-in-law said she did not look well, she affirmed that she was overworked—which was, in fact, in her eyes, the only reason for her fatigue. And then, dismissing such worries with a gesture of indifference, she would begin to play with her niece, Bronya’s baby, for whom she had great affection.
But one day when Marie fainted in front of one of her comrades, the latter hurried to the Rue d’Allemagne to warn the pair of young doctors. Two hours later Casimir was leaping up the six flights of stairs to the attic where the girl, a little pale, was already studying tomorrow’s lesson. He examined his sister-in-law. He examined even more carefully the clean plates, the empty stewpan, and the whole room, in which he could discover only one comestible, a packet of tea. All at once he understood—and the questioning began.
“What did you eat today?”
“Today? I don’t know. I lunched a while ago.”
“What did you eat?” Casimir’s voice took her up implacably.
“Some cherries and … and all sorts of things.”
In the end Marie was obliged to confess: since the evening before she had nibbled at a bundle of radishes and half a pound of cherries. She had worked until three that morning and had slept four hours. Then she had gone to the Sorbonne. On her return she had finished the radishes. Then she had fainted.
The doctor made no long speeches. He was furious. Furious against Marie, whose ash-gray eyes looked at him with profound fatigue and innocent mirth. Furious at himself, for he accused himself of not watching attentively enough over “the little one” who had been confided to him by M. Sklodovski. Without listening to his sister-in-law’s protests he handed her her hat and coat, and ordered her to take the books and papers she would need for the coming week. Then, silent, dissatisfied, unhappy, he carried her off to La Villette; from the threshold of the flat he hailed Bronya, who dashed for the kitchen.
Twenty minutes passed, and Marie swallowed, mouthful by mouthful, the medicines ordered for her by Casimir: an enormous underdone beefsteak and a plateful of crackling fried potatoes. As if by a miracle, the color came back to her cheeks. On the same evening Bronya herself came at eleven o’clock to put the light out in the narrow room where she had set up a bed for her sister. For several days Marie, well fed and cared for, “took the cure” and regained her strength. Then, obsessed by the approaching examinations, she returned to her attic, promising to be reasonable in the future.
And the next day she began again to live on air.
Work!… Work! Plunged altogether into study, intoxicated by her progress, Marie felt herself equal to learning everything mankind had ever discovered. She attended courses in mathematics, physics and chemistry. Manual technique and the minute precision of scientific experiment became familiar to her, little by little; soon she was to have the joy of being charged by Professor Lippmann with researches of no great importance, which nevertheless permitted her to show her deftness and the originality of her mind. In the physics laboratory of the Sorbonne, a high and wide room queerly ornamented by two little staircases which led to an interior gallery, Marie Sklodovska timidly tried her strength.
She had a passionate love for that atmosphere of attention and silence, the “climate” of the laboratory, which she was to prefer to any other up to her last day. She was on her feet, always on her feet, in front of an oak table supporting precision instruments, or else in front of the chemical hood where some material in fusion bubbled away, worried at by the fierce blowpipe. She was hardly to be distinguished, in her big smock of wrinkled linen, from the thoughtful young men who bent beside her over other blowpipes and other instruments. Like them, she respected the concentration of the place. She made no noise, she pronounced no useless word.
One master’s degree was not enough; Marie decided to obtain two: one in physics and one in mathematics. Her plans, once so humble, increased and grew richer so rapidly that she had not the time—and above all not the audacity—to confide them to M. Sklodovski, who, as she knew, impatiently awaited her return to Poland. As usual, the excellent man offered his help. But it could be felt that he was vaguely worried at having hatched this independent creature who had taken to flying with her own wings after so many years of submission and sacrifice.
M. Sklodovski to Bronya, March 5, 1893:
… Your last letter mentions for the first time that Manya intends to take her examinations for the master’s. She has never spoken to me about it in her letters, even though I have questioned her on the subject. Write me exactly when these examinations will take place, at what date Manya can hope to pass them, what are the fees for them and how much the diploma will cost. I must think of all this in advance so as to be able to send some money to Manya, and on this my personal plans will depend.
… I intend to keep the lodging I now occupy for next year: for myself and for Manya—if she comes back—it is perfectly suitable.… Little by little Manya will work up a list of pupils, and in any case I am ready to share what I have with her. We shall manage without trouble.…
Marie, however shy she might be, could not avoid meeting human beings every day. Some of the students were cordial and friendly with her. Foreign women were highly regarded at the Sorbonne. These poor girls, generally gifted, coming from far away to the university which the Goncourts called “the nursing mother of study,” inspired sympathy among young Frenchmen. The Polish girl was tamed. She discovered that her companions, who were “grinds” for the most part, esteemed her and wished to show her kindness. This kindness sometimes would have liked to become extremely kind indeed. Marie must have been very pretty: her friend, Mlle Dydynska, a charming and somewhat over-excited young woman who had appointed herself as bodyguard, one day threatened to beat off a group of too-eager admirers with her umbrella.
Allowing Mlle Dydynska to repel advances which left her indifferent, the girl drew nearer to men who did not pay court to her and with whom she could talk about her work. Between a physics lesson and a laboratory hour she would chatter with Paul Painlevé, who was already a professor; with Charles Maurain or Jean Perrin—future leaders of French science. These were distant comradeships. Marie had no time to give to friendship or to love. She loved mathematics and physics.
Her brain was so precise, her intelligence so marvelously clear, that no “Slavic” disorder intruded to corrupt her effort. She was supported by a will of iron, by a maniacal taste for perfection, and by an incredible stubbornness. Systematically, patiently, she attained each of the ends she had set for herself: she passed first in the master’s examination in physics in 1893,* and second in the master’s in mathematics in 1894.†
She had decided to know the French language perfectly, as it was indispensable to her; and instead of cooing incorrect, singsong sentences for years, as many Poles do, she learned her spelling and syntax with infallible sureness, and hounded down the very last traces of her accent. Only a very slight rolling of the “r” was to remain ever afterward as one of the graces of her rather muted voice, so sweet and charming.
With her forty rubles a month she succeeded in living, and even, by depriving herself of the indispensable, achieved sometimes a certain amount of luxury: an evening at the theater, a journey to the suburbs, whence she brought back flowers picked in the woods to glow for several days on her table. The little peasant of other days was not dead; lost in the great city, she lay in wait for the birth of the leaves, and as soon as she had a little time and money she hurried to the woods.
Marie to M. Sklodovski, April 16, 1893:
The other Sunday I went to Le Raincy, near Paris, in a pretty and agreeable neighborhood. The lilacs and the fruit trees, even the apples, were in full bloom and the air was filled with the scent of flowers.
In Paris the trees get green as early as the beginning of April. Now the leaves have sprung out and the chestnuts are blooming. It is as hot as in summer: everything is green. In my room it is beginning to be torrid. Luckily in July, when I shall be working for my examinations, I shall not be here any more, for I have taken the lodging only to the eighth of July.
The nearer the examinations come, the more I am afraid of not being ready. At the worst, I shall wait until November, but that will make me lose my summer, which doesn’t appeal to me. For that matter, we must wait and see.…
July. Fever, haste, agonizing trials, crushing mornings when, shut in with thirty students in the examination hall, Marie was so nervous that the letters danced before her eyes and she could not even read the fateful paper for several minutes, with its statement of the problem and the “questions on the course.” When the composition was turned in, there came days of waiting until the solemn moment of publication of the results. Marie slipped in among the contestants and their families, crowded into the amphitheater where the names of the elect would be read aloud, in order of merit. Pushed and shoved about as she was, she waited for the entrance of the examiner. And in a sudden silence she heard him pronounce first of all her own name: Marie Sklodovska.
Nobody was to guess her emotion. She tore herself away from the congratulations of her comrades, escaped from the crowd and made off. The time for holidays had come now—for the departure to Poland and home.
Such homecomings among the poor Poles had their rites, which Marie scrupulously observed. She moved her furniture—bed, stove and utensils—into safety with a compatriot rich enough to keep her Paris lodging during the summer months. She took leave of her garret: before quitting it forever, she cleaned it thoroughly. She said good-by to the portress, whom she would not see again, and bought some provisions for her journey. Having counted up what she had left, she went into a big shop and did what she had not done for a year: she looked for trinkets, for scarves.…
It was accounted a shame to return to one’s native land with money in the pocket. Grand style, supreme elegance, the law, required one to spend literally everything on presents for one’s family and get into the train at the Gare du Nord without a sou. Was this not a wise course? Two thousand kilometers away, at the other end of the rails, there were M. Sklodovski and Joseph and Hela, a familiar roof to sleep under, as much food as one could eat, and a seamstress who, for a few groszy, could cut out and sew linen and big woollen dresses: the dresses which Marie would wear when she came back to the Sorbonne again in November.
She was to reappear there cheerful and a bit too fat, having been stuffed with food for three months in all the houses of all the Sklodovskis in Poland, indignant as they were at her thinness. And again she faced a scholastic year in which she would work, learn, prepare an examination, grow thin.
But each time the autumn returned the same anxiety assailed Marie: how could she go back to Paris? Where was she to find money? Forty rubles at a time, her savings were being exhausted; and she thought with shame of the little pleasures her father deprived himself of to come to her help. In 1893 the situation seemed desperate and the girl was on the point of giving up the journey when a miracle took place. That same Mlle Dydynska who had defended her with an umbrella the year before now extended even more opportune protection. Certain that Marie was destined to a great future, she moved heaven and earth in Warsaw to have the “Alexandrovitch Scholarship” assigned to her—a scholarship for students of merit who wished to pursue their efforts abroad.
Six hundred rubles! Enough to live on for fifteen months! Marie, who knew so well how to ask favors for other people, would never have thought of soliciting this help, and above all could never have had the boldness to make the necessary approaches. Dazzled and enchanted, she took flight for France.
Marie to her brother Joseph, September 15, 1893:
… I have already rented my room, on the sixth floor, in a clean and decent street which suits me very well. Tell Father that in that place where I was going to take a room there was nothing free, and that I am very satisfied with this room: it has a window that shuts tight, and when I have arranged it properly it should not be cold here, especially as the floor is of wood and not tiles. Compared to my last year’s room it is a veritable palace. It costs one hundred and eighty francs a year, and is therefore sixty francs cheaper than the one Father spoke to me about.
I hardly need say that I am delighted to be back in Paris. It was very hard for me to separate again from Father, but I could see that he was well, very lively, and that he could do without me—especially as you are living in Warsaw. And as for me, it is my whole life that is at stake. It seemed to me, therefore, that I could stay on here without having remorse on my conscience.
Just now I am studying mathematics unceasingly, so as to be up to date when the courses begin. I have three mornings a week taken by lessons with one of my French comrades who is preparing for the examination I have just passed. Tell Father that I am getting used to this work, that it does not tire me as much as before, and that I do not intend to abandon it.
Today I begin the installation of my little corner for this year—very poorly, but what am I to do? I have to do everything myself; otherwise it’s all too dear. I must get my furniture into shape—or rather what I pompously call my furniture, for the whole thing isn’t worth more than twenty francs.
I shall write soon to Joseph Boguski and ask him for information about his laboratory. My future occupation depends on this.
Marie to her brother, March 18, 1894:
… It is difficult for me to tell you about my life in detail; it is so monotonous and, in fact, so uninteresting. Nevertheless I have no feeling of uniformity and I regret only one thing, which is that the days are so short and that they pass so quickly. One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done, and if one didn’t like the work it would be very discouraging.
I want you to pass your doctor’s thesis.… It seems that life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. Perhaps everything will turn out very well, at the moment when we least expect it.…
The Alexandrovitch Scholarship was providential. With passionate avarice Marie tried to string out her six hundred rubles, so as to remain a little longer in the paradise of lecture halls and laboratories. Some years later, with the same passionate avarice, she was to save six hundred rubles out of her first earnings—a technical study ordered from her by the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry—and was to take them to the secretary of the Alexandrovitch Foundation, stupefied though he was at a restitution without precedent in the annals of the committee. Marie had accepted this scholarship as testimony of confidence in her, a debt of honor. In her uncompromising soul she would have adjudged herself dishonest if she had kept for one unnecessary moment the money which now could serve as life buoy to another poor young girl.
Rereading a little poem of my mother’s, written in Polish, on this time of her life, and remembering the accounts of it that she sometimes gave me, with many a smile and humorous remark, looking at the only portrait of herself which she dearly cherished: the small photograph of a student girl with daring eyes and determined chin, I have felt that she never ceased to prefer these hard, fervent days to all others.
Ah! how harshly the youth of the student passes,
While all around her, with passions ever fresh,
Other youths search eagerly for easy pleasures!
And yet in solitude
She lives, obscure and blessed,
For in her cell she finds the ardor
That makes her heart immense.
But the blessed time is effaced.
She must leave the land of Science
To go out and struggle for her bread
On the grey roads of life.
Often and often then, her weary spirit
Returns beneath the roofs
To the corner ever dear to her heart
Where silent labor dwelled
And where a world of memory has rested.
No doubt Marie knew other joys later. But even in her hours of infinite tenderness, even in the hour of triumph and fame, the eternal student was never so content with herself, so proud, as in the poverty and fire of this integral effort. She was proud of her poverty; proud of living alone and independent in a foreign city. Working in the evening beneath the lamp in her poor room she felt that her destiny, still insignificant, mysteriously related itself to the high existences she most admired, and that she became the humble unknown companion of those great scientists of the past, who were, like her, shut into their ill-lighted cells, like her detached from their time, and, like her, spurred their minds to pass beyond the sum of acquired knowledge.
Yes, these four heroic years were, not the happiest of Marie Curie’s life, but the most perfect in her eyes, the nearest to those summits of the human mission toward which her gaze had been trained. When one is young and solitary and swallowed up in study, one can “not have enough to live on”—and yet live to the fullest. An immense enthusiasm gave this girl of twenty-six the power to ignore the trials and privations she endured; to magnify her sordid existence into magic. Later on, love, maternity, the worries of a wife and mother, the complexities of crushingly hard work, were to restore the visionary to real life. But in the enchanted moment when she was poorer than she was ever to be again, she was as reckless as a child. She floated lightly in another world, that which her thought was to regard always as the only pure and true one.
Each day could not be altogether excellent in an adventure like this. There were unforeseen accidents which suddenly upset everything and seemed irremediable: a fatigue impossible to surmount, a short illness requiring care. Still other, and terrifying catastrophes: the one pair of shoes, with leaky soles, gave out finally, and the purchase of new shoes became necessary. This meant a budget upside down for weeks, and the enormous expense had to be made up at all costs, on meals or on petroleum for the lamp.
Or else the winter was longer than usual and the sixth-floor garret was icy. It was so cold that Marie could no longer sleep; she shivered and chattered with it. Her supply of coal was exhausted.… But what of that? Could a Polish girl be conquered by a Parisian winter? Marie lighted her lamp again and looked about her. She opened the fat trunk and gathered together all the garments she possessed. She put on all she could, then, having slipped into bed, she piled the rest, her other dress, her linen, on top of the single coverlet. But it was still too cold. Marie stretched out her arm, pulled the one chair over to her, raised it and piled it, too, on top of the amassed garments, giving herself some sort of illusion of weight and heat.
All she had to do now was to wait for sleep, without moving, so as to preserve the scaffolding of which she was the living base. Meanwhile, a layer of ice was slowly forming in the water pitcher.