MARIE HAD RULED LOVE and marriage out of her life’s program. There was nothing extremely original in that. The poor girl, disappointed and humiliated in the failure of her first idyll, swore to love no more; still more, the Slavic student exalted by intellectual ambitions easily decided to renounce the things that make the servitude, happiness and unhappiness of other women, in order to follow her vocation. In all ages women who burn to become great painters or great musicians have disdained the norm, love and motherhood. Most often they are converted to family life when their dreams of glory come to nothing; or else, when they do make careers, it is in fact at the sacrifice of their sentimental life.
Marie had built for herself a secret universe of implacable rigor, dominated by the passion for science. Family affection and the attachment to an oppressed fatherland also had their place in it: but this was all. Nothing else counted, nothing else existed. Thus had she decreed, the beautiful creature of twenty-six who lived alone in Paris and met young men every day at the Sorbonne and in the laboratory.
Marie was obsessed by her dreams, harassed by poverty, overdriven by intensive work. She did not know leisure and its dangers. Her pride and timidity protected her, as did her distrust: ever since the Z.’s had rejected her as a daughter-in-law she had had the vague conviction that poor girls found no devotion or tenderness among men. Stiffened by fine theories and bitter reflections, she clung fiercely to her independence.
No, it is not surprising that a Polish girl of genius, isolated by her arid existence, should have preserved herself for her work. But it is surprising, indeed wonderful, that a scientist of genius, a Frenchman, should have kept himself for that Polish girl, should have unconsciously waited for her. It is wonderful that at the time when Marie, still almost a child in the narrow apartment of Novolipki Street, dreamed of coming to study some day at the Sorbonne, Pierre Curie, returning home from that same Sorbonne, where he was already making important discoveries in physics, should have written down in his diary these melancholy lines:
… Woman loves life for the living of it far more than we do: women of genius are rare. Thus, when we, driven by some mystic love, wish to enter upon some anti-natural path, when we give all our thoughts to some work which estranges us from the humanity nearest us, we have to struggle against women. The mother wants the love of her child above all things, even if it should make an imbecile of him. The mistress also wishes to possess her lover, and would find it quite natural to sacrifice the rarest genius in the world for an hour of love. The struggle almost always is unequal, for women have the good side of it: it is in the name of life and nature that they try to bring us back.…
Years had passed. Pierre Curie, devoting body and soul to scientific research, had married none of the insignificant or nice little girls who had come his way. He was thirty-five years old. He loved nobody.
When he was idly running through his diary, abandoned long ago, and re-read the notes once made in ink that was already growing pale, a few words full of regret and dull nostalgia caught his attention:
“… women of genius are rare.…”
When I came in, Pierre Curie was standing in the window recess near a door leading to the balcony. He seemed very young to me, although he was then aged thirty-five. I was struck by the expression of his clear gaze and by a slight appearance of carelessness in his lofty stature. His rather slow, reflective words, his simplicity, and his smile, at once grave and young, inspired confidence. A conversation began between us and became friendly; its object was some questions of science upon which I was happy to ask his opinion.
Such were the words Marie was to use to describe their first meeting, which took place at the beginning of 1894.
A Pole, M. Kovalski, professor of physics in the University of Fribourg, was visiting Paris with his young wife, whom Marie had met at Szczuki. It was their honeymoon, but a scientific expedition as well. M. Kovalski gave some lectures in Paris, and attended the sessions of the Physics Society. On his arrival he had inquired after Marie and had asked her how she was. Marie had confided in him her worries of the moment: the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry had ordered a study from her on the magnetic properties of various steels. She had begun the researches in Professor Lippmann’s laboratory; but she had to analyze minerals and group samples of metal, which required a cumbersome equipment—too cumbersome for the already crowded laboratory. And Marie did not know what to do, where to conduct her experiments.
“I have an idea,” Joseph Kovalski said to her after some moments of reflection. “I know a scientist of great merit who works in the School of Physics and Chemistry in the Rue Lhomond. Perhaps he might have a workroom available. In any case he could give you some advice. Come and have tea tomorrow evening, after dinner, with my wife and me. I will ask the young man to come. You probably know his name: it is Pierre Curie.”
In the course of the calm evening passed in the young couple’s room in a quiet boardinghouse, immediate sympathy brought the French physicist and the Polish student together.
Pierre Curie had a very individual charm made up of gravity and careless grace. He was tall. His clothes, cut on ample, old-fashioned lines, hung a bit loosely about his body, but they became him: he had much natural elegance. His hands were long and sensitive. His regular, almost motionless face, lengthened by a rough beard, was made beautiful by his peaceful eyes with their incomparable look, deep and serene, detached from all things.
Although this man maintained a constant reserve and never lifted his voice, it was impossible not to notice his expression of rare intelligence and distinction. In a civilization in which intellectual superiority is seldom allied to moral worth, Pierre Curie was an almost unique specimen of humanity: his mind was both powerful and noble.
The attraction he felt from the first moment for the foreign girl who spoke so little was doubled by intense curiosity. This Mlle Sklodovska was truly a rather astonishing person.… She was Polish, come from Warsaw to study at the Sorbonne, had passed first in the physics examination last year, would pass her mathematics examination in a few months.… And if between her ashen-gray eyes a little preoccupied wrinkle appeared, was it not because she didn’t know where to install her apparatus for the study of magnetism in steel?
The conversation, at first general, was soon reduced to a scientific dialogue between Pierre Curie and Marie Sklodovska. Marie, with a shade of timidity and deference, asked questions and listened to Pierre’s suggestions. He in turn explained his plans, and described the phenomena of crystallography which fascinated him and upon which he was now engaged in research. How strange it was, the physicist thought, to talk to a woman of the work one loves, using technical terms, complicated formulæ, and to see that woman, charming and young, become animated, understand, even discuss certain details with an infallible clear-sightedness.… How sweet it was!
He looked at Marie’s hair, at her high, curved forehead and her hands already stained by the acids of the laboratory and roughened by housework. He was disconcerted by her grace, which the absence of all coquetry made more surprising. He dug from his memory all that his host had told him about the girl when he had invited them together: she had worked for years before being able to take the train for Paris, she had no money, she lived alone in a garret.…
“Are you going to remain in France always?” he asked Mlle Sklodovska, without knowing why.
A shadow passed over Marie’s face, and she replied in her singing accent:
“Certainly not. This summer, if I succeed in my master’s examination, I shall go back to Warsaw. I should like to come back here in the autumn, but I don’t know whether I shall have the means to do so. Later on I shall be a teacher in Poland; I shall try to be useful. Poles have no right to abandon their country.”
The conversation, in which the Kovalskis joined, turned toward the painful subject of Russian oppression. The three exiles evoked memories of their native land and exchanged news of their families and friends. Astonished, vaguely dissatisfied, Pierre Curie listened to Marie speak of her patriotic and social duties.
A physicist obsessed by physics, he could not imagine how this amazingly gifted girl could devote even one thought to anything outside of science, and that her plan for the future should be to use her strength in a struggle against Tsarism.
He wanted to see her again.
Who was Pierre Curie?
He was a French scientist of genius, very nearly unknown in his own country, but already highly esteemed by his foreign colleagues.
He was born in Paris, in the Rue Cuvier, on May 15, 1859. He was the second son of a physician, Dr Eugène Curie, who was himself the son of a doctor. The family was of Alsatian origin, and Protestant. The Curies, once of the lower bourgeoisie, had, through generations, become intellectuals and scientists. Pierre’s father had to practice medicine to earn his living; but he was devoted to research. He had been for some time a worker in the laboratory of the Museum of Natural History in Paris, and he was the author of works on tubercular infection.
His two sons, Jacques and Pierre, were drawn by science from their infancy. Pierre, with his independent and dreamy mind, was unable to adapt himself to systematic work and discipline. He had never been to school. Dr Curie, understanding that the boy was too original to be a brilliant pupil, had at first instructed him himself, and afterward had confided him to a remarkable teacher, M. Bazille. This liberal education had borne fruit: Pierre Curie was a Bachelor of Science* at sixteen and had a master’s degree in physics† at eighteen. At nineteen he was appointed laboratory assistant to Professor Desains in the Faculty of Science—a position he occupied for five years. He was engaged in research with his brother Jacques, who also had his degree and was a laboratory worker at the Sorbonne. The two young physicists soon announced the discovery of the important phenomenon of “piezoelectricity,” and their experimental work led them to invent a new apparatus with many practical uses: piezoelectric quartz, which measures small quantities of electricity with precision.
In 1883 the two brothers separated with regret: Jacques was appointed professor at Montpellier, and Pierre became chief of laboratory at the School of Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris. Even though he devoted much time to demonstrations for the pupils, he pursued his theoretical work on crystalline physics. This work led to the formulation of the principle of symmetry, which was to become one of the bases of modern science.
Taking up his experimental study again, Pierre Curie invented and built an ultra-sensitive scientific scale, the “Curie scale.” Then he undertook research on magnetism and obtained a result of capital importance: the discovery of a fundamental law: “Curie’s law.”
For these efforts, crowned by dazzling success, and for the constant care he lavished on the thirty students confided to him, Pierre Curie was receiving from the French State, in 1894, after fifteen years of work, a salary of three hundred francs a month—just about what a specialized worker would receive in a factory.
But when the illustrious English scientist, Lord Kelvin, came to Paris, he was not satisfied with going to hear Pierre Curie’s reports to the Physics Society. In spite of his great age and position, he wrote to the young physicist, spoke of his work, and asked for a meeting.
Lord Kelvin to Pierre Curie, August 1893:
DEAR MONSIEUR CURIE,
I thank you very much for having taken the trouble to obtain for me an apparatus by which I can so conveniently observe the magnificent experimental discovery of piezoelectric quartz, made by you and your brother.
I have written a note for the Philosophical Magazine, making it clear that your work preceded mine. This note should arrive in time to appear in the October number, but if not it will certainly appear in November.…
October 3, 1893:
DEAR MONSIEUR CURIE,
I hope to arrive in Paris tomorrow evening; I should be very grateful if you could let me know when, between now and the end of the week, it would be convenient for you to let me come and see you in your laboratory.
In the course of these visits, when the two physicists discussed scientific questions for hours, the English scientist must have been astonished to observe that Pierre Curie was working without assistants in a pitiable place, that he devoted most of his time to poorly paid drudgery, and that hardly anybody in Paris knew the name of this man whom he, Lord Kelvin, considered a master.
Pierre Curie was even more than a remarkable physicist. He was a man who, when asked to offer himself as candidate for a post which would improve his material condition, replied:
They tell me one of the professors may perhaps resign and that in case he does I should submit my candidature as his successor. It is a nasty job being a candidate for any place at all, and I am not accustomed to this sort of exercise, demoralizing in the highest degree. I am sorry I spoke of it to you. I believe there is nothing more unhealthy for the mind than to allow one’s self to be preoccupied with such matters.
When proposed by the director of the School of Physics for a decoration (the “academic palms”) he refused in these terms:
MR DIRECTOR,
Mr Muzet has told me that you intend to propose me to the Prefect again for decoration.
I write to beg you to do no such thing. If you obtain this distinction for me, you will put me under the obligation of refusing it, for I have quite decided never to accept any decoration of any sort. I hope you will be good enough to spare me the necessity of a step which would make me rather ridiculous in the eyes of many people.
If it is your intention to give me an evidence of interest, you have already done so and in more efficacious fashion—by which I have been much touched—in allowing me the means of working at my ease.
He was also, or at least could have been, a writer. This man whose education had been so fantastic was possessed of an original, strong and graceful style:
“To stun with clatter a mind that wishes to think.”‡
Weak as I am, in order not to let my mind fly away on every wind that blows, yielding to the slightest breath it encounters, it would be necessary either to have everything motionless around me, or else, speeding on like a humming top, in movement itself to be rendered impervious to external things.
Whenever, rotating slowly on myself, I attempt to speed up, the merest nothing—a word, a story, a newspaper, a visit—stops me, prevents my becoming a gyroscope or top, and can postpone or forever delay the instant when, equipped with sufficient speed, I might be able to concentrate within myself in spite of what is around me.
We are obliged to eat, drink, sleep, laze, love; that is to say, to touch the sweetest things in this life, and yet not succumb. What is necessary is, in doing all that, to make the anti-natural thought to which one has devoted one’s self remain dominant and continue its impassable course in one’s poor head. One must make of life a dream, and of that dream a reality.
Finally, he had the sensibility and imagination of a poet or an artist, with their discouragements and anguish.
What shall I be later on? [he wrote in his diary in 1881]. I am very rarely all under command at once; ordinarily a portion of my being is asleep. It seems to me that my mind gets clumsier every day. Before, I flung myself into scientific or other divagations; today I barely touch on subjects and do not allow myself to be absorbed by them any more. And I have so many, many things to do! Is my poor mind then so feeble that it cannot act upon my body? Is thought itself unable to move my poor mind? Then it is worth very little! And Pride, Ambition—couldn’t they at least propel me, or will they let me live like this? In my imagination I shall find most confidence to pull myself out of the rut. Imagination may perhaps entice my mind and carry it away. But I am very much afraid that imagination, too, may be dead …
The poet had been immediately captivated by Marie Sklodovska, as had the physicist, and had understood what was unique in her. Pierre Curie, with gentle tenacity, endeavored to get on friendly terms with the girl. He saw her again two or three times at the sessions of the Physics Society, where she was listening to the reports of scientists on new research. He sent her, by way of compliment, a reprint of his latest publication, On Symmetry in Physical Phenomena: Symmetry of an Electric Field and of a Magnetic Field; and on the first page he wrote in his awkward hand, “To Mlle Sklodovska, with the respect and friendship of the author, P. Curie.” He had seen her in Lippmann’s laboratory, in her big linen smock, bent silently over her apparatus.
And then he asked if he could visit her. Marie gave him her address, 11 Rue des Feuillantines. Friendly but reserved, she received him in her little room, and Pierre, his heart constricted by so much poverty, nevertheless appreciated, in the depths of his spirit, the subtle agreement between the character and the setting. In an almost empty attic, with her threadbare dress and her ardent, stubborn features, Marie had never seemed more beautiful to him. Her young face, thin and worn from the effort of an ascetic life, could not have found a more perfect frame than this denuded garret.
A few months passed. Their friendship strengthened, their intimacy increased, in proportion as their reciprocal esteem, admiration and confidence grew greater. Pierre Curie was already the captive of the too-intelligent, too-lucid Polish girl. He obeyed her and followed her advice. He was soon urged and stimulated by her to shake off his indolence, write out his experiments on magnetism, and pass a brilliant thesis for the doctor’s degree.
Marie still believed herself to be free. She did not seem disposed to listen to the final words which the scientist did not dare to pronounce.
This evening, for perhaps the tenth time, they were together in the room in the Rue des Feuillantines. It was warm: it was the end of an afternoon in June. On the table, near the mathematics books with the help of which Marie was preparing her approaching examination, there were some white daisies in a glass, brought back from an excursion Pierre and Marie had made together. The girl poured out tea, made on her faithful little alcohol lamp.
The physicist had just been speaking at length about a piece of work that preoccupied him. Then, without transition:
“I wish you would come to know my parents. I live with them, in a little house at Sceaux. They are charming.”
He described his father for her: a tall, ungainly old man with lively blue eyes, very intelligent, hasty and impetuous, apt to boil over like a quick soup, but extremely kind—and his mother, weighed down by infirmities, but still an expert housekeeper, brave, gay and courageous. He recalled his fantastic childhood, his interminable jaunts in the woods with his brother Jacques.…
Marie listened with surprise. What mysterious likenesses and coincidences! By changing a few details, transporting the little house at Sceaux to a street in Warsaw, you could turn the Curies into the Sklodovski family. Aside from religion—Dr Curie, an anticlerical freethinker, had not had his children baptized—it was the same sort of circle, wise and honorable, with the same respect for culture, the same love of science, the same affectionate alliance between parents and children, the same passionate liking for nature. Smiling and more at her ease, Marie told the tale of her merry holidays in the Polish countryside—that countryside which she was going to see again in a few weeks.
“But you’re coming back in October? Promise me that you will come back! If you stay in Poland you can’t possibly continue your studies. You have no right to abandon science now.…”
These commonplace words of solicitude betrayed profound anxiety. And Marie felt that when Pierre said, “You have no right to abandon science,” he meant, above all, “You have no right to abandon me.”
They were silent for a time. Then Marie, lifting her ash-gray eyes to Pierre, answered gently, in a voice that still hesitated:
“I believe you are right. I should like to come back—very much.”
Pierre spoke of the future several times again. He had asked Marie to be his wife; but the answer was not a happy one. To marry a Frenchman and leave her family forever, to renounce all political activity and abandon Poland, seemed to Mlle Sklodovska like so many dreadful acts of betrayal. She could not and must not. She had passed her examination brilliantly; and now she must go back to Warsaw for the summer at least, perhaps forever. She offered the discouraged young scientist a friendship which was no longer enough for him, and took her train, having promised nothing.
He followed her in thought; he would have liked to join her in Switzerland, where she was passing a few weeks with her father who had come to meet her; or else in Poland—in that Poland of which he was jealous. But it could not be.…
So, from afar, he continued to urge his suit. Wherever Marie went, during the summer months, to Crettaz, Lemberg, Cracow or Warsaw, letters in uncertain and rather childish handwriting followed, on inexpensive paper headed by the name of the School of Physics, attempting to convince her and bring her back: to remind her that Pierre Curie was waiting for her.
Pierre Curie to Marie Sklodovska, August 10, 1894:
Nothing could have given me greater pleasure than to get news of you. The prospect of remaining two months without hearing about you had been extremely disagreeable to me: that is to say, your little note was more than welcome.
I hope you are laying up a stock of good air and that you will come back to us in October. As for me, I think I shall not go anywhere; I shall stay in the country, where I spend the whole day in front of my open window or in the garden.
We have promised each other—haven’t we?—to be at least great friends. If you will only not change your mind! For there are no promises that are binding; such things cannot be ordered at will. It would be a fine thing, just the same, in which I hardly dare believe, to pass our lives near each other, hypnotized by our dreams: your patriotic dream, our humanitarian dream, and our scientific dream.
Of all those dreams the last is, I believe, the only legitimate one. I mean by that that we are powerless to change the social order and, even if we were not, we should not know what to do; in taking action, no matter in what direction, we should never be sure of not doing more harm than good, by retarding some inevitable evolution. From the scientific point of view, on the contrary, we may hope to do something; the ground is solider here, and any discovery that we may make, however small, will remain acquired knowledge.
See how it works out: it is agreed that we shall be great friends, but if you leave France in a year it would be an altogether too platonic friendship, that of two creatures who would never see each other again. Wouldn’t it be better for you to stay with me? I know that this question angers you, and that you don’t want to speak of it again—and then, too, I feel so thoroughly unworthy of you from every point of view.
I thought of asking your permission to meet you by chance in Fribourg. But you are staying there, unless I am mistaken, only one day, and on that day you will of course belong to our friends the Kovalskis.
Believe me your very devoted
PIERRE CURIE.
I should be happy if you would write to me and give me the assurance that you intend to come back in October. If you write direct to Sceaux the letters would get to me quicker: Pierre Curie, 13 Rue des Sablons, Sceaux (Seine).
Pierre Curie to Marie Sklodovska, August 14, 1894:
I couldn’t decide to come and meet you; I hesitated all through one day, only to come to this negative result in the end. The first impression I received in reading your letter was that you preferred me not to come. The second was that you were very kind, just the same, to allow me the possibility of passing three days with you, and I was on the point of leaving. But then I was attacked by a sort of shame at pursuing you like this against your will; and finally, what decided me to stay, was the near-certainty that my presence would be disagreeable to your father and would spoil his pleasure in your company.
Now that it is too late, I am sorry I did not go. Wouldn’t it have doubled the friendship we have for each other, perhaps, if we had passed three days together—and wouldn’t it have given us strength not to forget each other in the two months and a half that separate us?
Are you a fatalist? Do you remember the day of Mi-Carême?§ I had suddenly lost you in the crowd. It seems to me that our friendly relations will be suddenly interrupted in the same way without either of us desiring it. I am not a fatalist, but this will probably be a result of our characters. I shall never know how to act at the opportune moment.
For that matter it will be a good thing for you, for I do not know why I have got it into my head to keep you in France, to exile you from your country and family without having anything good to offer you in exchange for such a sacrifice.
Aren’t you a little pretentious when you say you are perfectly free? We are all slaves at least of our affections, slaves of the prejudices of those we love; we must also earn our living, and thereby become a part of the machine, etc., etc.
The most painful thing is the concessions we are forced to make to the prejudices of the society that surrounds us; one makes them more or less often, according to one’s strength or weakness. If we don’t make enough we are crushed; and if we make too many we are vile and acquire a disgust for ourselves. I am now far away from the principles I held ten years ago. At that time I believed one ought to be excessive in everything and make no concession to environment. I thought I had to exaggerate defects as well as qualities; I wore only blue shirts like workmen, etc., etc.
So, you see, I have become very old and feel greatly weakened. I hope you will enjoy yourself very much.
Your devoted friend,
PIERRE CURIE.
Pierre Curie to Marie Sklodovska, September 7, 1894:
… As you may imagine, your letter worries me. I strongly advise you to come back to Paris in October. It would be a great grief to me if you did not come back this year; but it is not out of a friend’s selfishness that I tell you to come back. Only, I believe that you would work better here and can do a more solid and useful job.
What would you think of somebody who thought of butting his head against a stone wall in hope of knocking it over? It might be an idea resulting from the finest feelings, but in fact that idea would be ridiculous and stupid. I believe that certain questions require a general solution, but are no longer capable of local solutions nowadays; and that when one engages in a course which has no issue one can do a great deal of harm. I further believe that justice is not of this world, and that the strongest system, or rather the most economic, is the one that must prevail. Man is worn out by work and has a miserable life just the same: that is a revolting thing, but it isn’t for that reason that it will disappear. It will disappear, probably, because man is a kind of machine and there is an advantage, from the economic point of view, in making any sort of machine work in its normal way without forcing it.
You have an amazing way of understanding selfishness! When I was twenty I had a dreadful misfortune: I lost, in terrible circumstances, a childhood friend whom I loved. I haven’t the courage to tell you all about it. I went through days and nights with a fixed idea, and experienced a sort of delight in torturing myself. Then I vowed, in all good faith, to lead a priest’s existence; I promised myself to be interested only in thing thereafter, and never again to think either of myself or of mankind. Since then I have often asked if this renunciation of life was not simply a trick which I used against myself to acquire the right to forget.
Is correspondence free in your country? I doubt it; and I think it would be better, in the future, to write no more dissertations which, even though purely philosophical, might be badly interpreted and could cause you trouble.
You can write to me, if you only will, at 13 Rue des Sablons.
Your devoted friend,
P. CURIE.
Pierre Curie to Marie Sklodovska, September 17, 1894:
Your letter worried me a great deal; I felt that you were worried and undecided. Your letter from Warsaw reassures me a little; I feel you have regained your calm. Your picture pleases me enormously. How kind of you to send it to me! I thank you with all my heart.
And finally, you are coming back to Paris; that gives me great pleasure. I want very much for us to become at least inseparable friends. Don’t you agree?
If you were French, you could easily manage to be a professor in the secondary schools or in a girls’ normal school. Would that profession please you?
Your very devoted friend,
P. CURIE.
I showed your photograph to my brother. Was that wrong? He admired it. He added: “She has a very decided look, not to say stubborn.”
Would it not in itself be a splendid title to fame, to have inspired such letters?
October came. Pierre’s heart swelled with happiness: Marie, according to her promise, had returned to Paris. She was to be seen again at the lectures in the Sorbonne and at Lippmann’s laboratory. But this year—her last in France, as she believed—she no longer lived in the Latin Quarter. Bronya had given her a room adjoining the office she had opened for consultation at 37 Rue de Chateaudun. As the Dluskis still lived in La Villette and Bronya came to the Rue de Chateaudun only during the day, Marie could thus work in peace.
It was in this dark and rather dismal lodging that Pierre Curie resumed his tender entreaties. He bore within him the same faith as his future wife, a faith which was even more wholehearted, purer by its lack of alloy. For Pierre, science was the only aim. Thus his was a strange and almost incredible adventure, for it mixed the essential aspiration of his mind into the movement of his heart. He felt himself drawn toward Marie by an impulse of love and at the same time by the highest necessity.
He was even ready to sacrifice what people call happiness to another happiness known to him alone. He made Marie a proposal which at first seems fantastic, which might pass for a ruse or an approach, but which was characteristic of his nature. If Marie had no love for him, he asked, could she resolve upon a purely friendly arrangement at least, and work with him “in an apartment in the Rue Mouffetard, with windows giving on a garden, an apartment which could be divided into two independent parts?”
Or else (since necessity names its own price) if he, Pierre Curie, went to Poland and obtained a position would she marry him? He could give French lessons; then, with whatever means at their disposal, he would engage in scientific research with her …
Before the former governess who had once been disdained by a Polish squireen family, this man of genius became an humble supplicant.
Marie confided her perplexities and anxieties to Bronya, speaking of Pierre’s offer to exile himself. She did not feel that she had the right to accept such sacrifice, but she was troubled and moved by the idea that Pierre loved her enough to have thought of it.
When he learned that the girl had spoken of him to the Dluskis, Pierre tried a new attack on that side. He went to see Bronya, whom he had already met several times; he won her over completely; he asked her to come with Marie to his parents’ house at Sceaux. Dr Curie’s wife took Bronya aside and in a gentle, touching voice asked her to speak to her younger sister.
“There isn’t a soul on earth to equal my Pierre,” Mme Curie insisted. “Don’t let your sister hesitate. She will be happier with him than with anybody.”
Ten more months had to pass before the obdurate Pole accepted the idea of marriage. Like a true Slavic “intellectual,” Marie was encumbered with theories on life and duty. Some of her theories were generous and fine; others were only childish. Above all—and Pierre had understood this for a long time—it was not her theories that made Marie a superior being. The scientist made quick work of principles which Marie shared with several thousands of her cultivated compatriots. What held and fascinated him was her total devotion to work; it was her genius that he felt; it was also her courage and nobility. This graceful girl had the character and gifts of a great man.
Principles? He, too, had lived on principles for a long time, and life had undertaken to demonstrate their absurdity. He, too, had sworn never to get married. He had no Poland to defend, but he had always believed marriage to be incompatible with an existence devoted to science. The tragic end of an ardent youthful love had turned him in upon himself, and had kept him away from women. He no longer wanted to love: a salutary principle which had saved him from commonplace marriage and made him wait for this meeting with an exceptional woman, a woman “made for him”—for Marie. And now he would not be stupid enough to let the chance of great happiness and a wonderful collaboration escape him for the sake of a “principle.” He would win the girl, the Pole and the physicist, three persons who had become indispensable to him.…
Thus he gently reasoned with Mlle Sklodovska. By such words and by others more tender, by the protection he offered her and by the deep, irresistible charm of his daily presence, Pierre Curie gradually made a human being out of the young hermit.
On July 14, 1895, Marie’s brother Joseph sent her the affectionate absolution of the Sklodovski family:
… As you are now M. Curie’s fiancée, I offer you first of all my sincerest good wishes, and may you find with him all the happiness and joy you deserve in my eyes and in the eyes of all who know your excellent heart and character.
… I think you are right to follow your heart, and no just person can reproach you for it. Knowing you, I am convinced that you will remain Polish with all your soul, and also that you will never cease to be part of our family in your heart. And we, too, will never cease to love you and to consider you ours.
I would infinitely rather see you in Paris, happy and contented, than back again in our country, broken by the sacrifice of a whole life and victim of a too-subtle conception of your duty. What we must do now is try to see each other as often as possible, in spite of everything.
A thousand kisses, dear Manya; and again let me wish you happiness, joy and success. Give my affectionate regards to your fiancé. Tell him that I welcome him as a future member of our family and that I offer him my friendship and sympathy without reserve. I hope that he will also give me his friendship and esteem.
A few days later Marie wrote to Kazia, her girlhood friend, and announced the decision she had taken:
When you receive this letter your Manya will have changed her name. I am about to marry the man I told you about last year in Warsaw. It is a sorrow to me to have to stay forever in Paris, but what am I to do? Fate has made us deeply attached to each other and we cannot endure the idea of separating.
I haven’t written, because all this was decided only a short time ago, quite suddenly. I hesitated for a whole year and could not resolve upon an answer. Finally I became reconciled to the idea of settling here. When you receive this letter, write to me: Madame Curie, School of Physics and Chemistry, 42 Rue Lhomond.
That is my name from now on. My husband is a teacher in that school. Next year I shall bring him to Poland so that he will know my country, and I shall not fail to introduce him to my dear little chosen sister, and I shall ask her to love him.…
On July 26, Marie awoke for the last time in her lodging in the Rue de Chateaudun. It was a marvelous day. The girl’s face was beautiful. Something her student comrades had never seen was alight in her face: today Mlle Sklodovska was to become Mme Pierre Curie.
She dressed her lovely hair and put on her wedding dress, a present from Casimir Dluski’s aged mother, who now lived in the Rue d’Allemagne. “I have no dress except the one I wear every day,” Marie had said. “If you are going to be kind enough to give me one, please let it be practical and dark, so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the laboratory.”
Guided by Bronya, Mme Glet, a little dressmaker in the Rue Dancourt, had made the dress: a navy-blue woollen suit and a blue blouse with lighter blue stripes, in which Marie was pretty, fresh and young.
Marie loved the idea of her wedding, which was to be, in every detail of the great day, different from all other weddings. There would be no white dress, no gold ring, no “wedding breakfast.” There would be no religious ceremony: Pierre was a freethinker and Marie, for a long time past, had ceased the practices of religion. There were no lawyers necessary, as the marriage pair possessed nothing in the world—nothing but two glittering bicycles, bought the day before with money sent as a present from a cousin, with which they were going to roam the countryside in the coming summer.
It was to be a wonderful wedding indeed, for neither indifference nor curiosity nor envy were to be present. At the city hall in Sceaux and in the little garden at Pierre’s parents’ house in the Rue des Sablons there would be Bronya and Casimir, a few very close friends—university people—and Professor Sklodovski, who had come from Warsaw with Hela.… The professor made it a point of honor to talk to old Dr Curie in the most correct and careful French; but first of all he would say, in his lowest tone, very moved, these words straight from his good heart: “You will have a daughter worthy of affection in Marie. Since she came into the world she has never caused me pain.”
Pierre came to get Marie. They had to go to the Luxembourg station for the train to Sceaux, where their parents were waiting. They went up the Boulevard Saint-Michel on the top of an omnibus in the bright sun, and from the height of their triumphal chariot looked down on the passing of familiar places.
In front of the Sorbonne, at the entrance to the Faculty of Science, Marie squeezed her companion’s arm a little and sought his glance, luminous and at peace.