THOUGH SWITZERLAND was the first country to offer the Curies a position worthy of their merit—remember the University of Geneva’s letter—their first honors came from England.
In France some scientific rewards had been given them: Pierre received the Planté Prize in 1895 and the Lacaze Prize in 1901. Marie had received the Gegner Prize three times. But no distinction of great brilliance had yet come their way when, in June 1903, the Royal Institution officially invited Pierre Curie to lecture on radium. The physicist accepted and went to London with his wife for this ceremonial.
A familiar face welcomed them, shining with friendliness and benevolence: Lord Kelvin. The illustrious old man made the success of the young couple his personal business, and was as proud of their researches as if they had been his own. He took them to see his laboratory; as they went along, he threw a paternal arm over Pierre’s shoulder. With touching pleasure he showed his collaborators the present that had been brought him from Paris: it was a true physicist’s present, a precious particle of radium enclosed in a glass tube.
On the evening of the lecture Lord Kelvin was seated beside Marie—the first woman who had ever been admitted to the sessions of the Royal Institution. In the crowded hall, the whole of English science gathered: Sir William Crookes, Lord Rayleigh, Lord Avebury, Sir Frederick Bramwell, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professors Dewar, Ray Lankester, Ayrton, S. P. Thompson, Armstrong.… Speaking in French, with his slow voice, Pierre described the properties of radium. Then he asked for darkness and proceeded to make several striking experiments: by the witchcraft of radium he discharged a gold-leaf electroscope at a distance, rendered a screen of zinc sulphate phosphorescent, made impressions on photographic plates wrapped in black paper, and proved the spontaneous release of heat from the marvelous substance.
The enthusiasm aroused by that evening had its repercussion on the morrow: all London wanted to see the parents of radium. “Professor and Madame Curie” were invited to dinners and banquets.
At these brilliant receptions, they listened to the toasts given in their honor and replied by brief words of gratitude. Pierre, dressed in the rather shiny suit of tails in which he always lectured at the P.C.N., gave, in spite of his great politeness, the impression of being elsewhere, of understanding with difficulty that these compliments were addressed to him. Marie uneasily felt thousands of glances fixed upon her—on this rarest of animals, this phenomenon: a woman physicist!
Her dress was dark, only slightly cut out at the neck; her hands, ruined by acids, were bare: there was not even a wedding ring to be seen on them. Near her, over bare throats, there gleamed the finest diamonds in the empire. Marie looked upon these jewels with sincere pleasure and noticed with surprise that her husband, ordinarily so absent-minded, also had his eyes fixed on the necklaces and jeweled collars.
“I didn’t even imagine that such jewels existed,” she said to Pierre that evening as she was undressing. “How pretty they are!”
The physicist began to laugh.
“Do you know, during dinner, when I didn’t know what to think about, I discovered a game: I calculated how many laboratories could be built with the stones that each woman present was wearing around her neck. When the time for the speeches arrived I had got up to an astronomical number of buildings.”
After a few days the Curies went back to their shed. They had formed solid friendships in London and planned various collaborations: Pierre was to publish soon, with his English colleague Professor Dewar, a study on the gases released by radium bromide.
The Anglo-Saxons are faithful to those they admire. In November 1903 a letter announced to Pierre and Marie that the Royal Society of London wished to mark its esteem for them by one of its highest awards: the Davy Medal.
Marie, who was ill, let her husband go to the ceremony without her. Pierre brought back from England a heavy gold medal, on which their names were engraved. He looked for a place for the medal in their house in the Boulevard Kellermann. He handled it awkwardly; he lost and found it again. Finally, seized with a sudden inspiration, he confided it to his daughter Irène, who had never had such a gala day in her six years.
When his friends came to see him, the scientist showed them the child amusing herself with the new toy.
“Irène adores her big new penny!” he said by way of conclusion.
The brilliance of two brief journeys, and a little girl playing with a golden disc: such was the prelude of the symphony which was now approaching its all-powerful crescendo.
It was from Sweden, this time, that the conductor gave the signal.
In its “solemn general meeting” of December 10, 1903, the Academy of Science of Stockholm publicly announced that the Nobel Prize in Physics for the current year was awarded half to Henri Becquerel, half to M. and Mme Curie for their discoveries in radioactivity.
Neither of the Curies was present at the session. The French Minister received the diplomas and gold medals in their names from the King’s hands. Unwell and overworked, Pierre and Marie had shrunk from the long journey in midwinter.
Professor Aurivillius to M. and Mme Curie, November 14,1903:
M. AND MME CURIE,
As I have had the honor of informing you telegraphically, the Swedish Academy of Science, in its session of November 12, decided to bestow on you half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for this year, as evidence of its appreciation of your extraordinary work in common on the Becquerel rays.
On December 10, at the ceremonial general meeting, the decisions of the various bodies charged with the distribution of prizes—which must be kept strictly secret until then—will be published, and on the same occasion the diplomas and gold medals will also be distributed.
In the name of the Academy of Science, I therefore invite you to be present at this meeting to receive your prize in person.
According to Article 9 of the statute of the Nobel Foundation, you are required to make a public lecture in Stockholm during the six months following the meeting, on the subject of the work for which the prize is awarded. If you come to Stockholm at the said time, it would no doubt be best to discharge this obligation during the days immediately following the meeting, if that arrangement suits you.
Hoping that the Academy will have the great pleasure of seeing you in Stockholm, I beg of you, monsieur and madame, to accept the assurance of my distinguished regard.
Pierre Curie to Professor Aurivillius, November 19, 1903:
MR SECRETARY,*
We are very grateful to the Academy of Science of Stockholm for the great honor it does us in awarding us half of the Nobel Prize for Physics. We beg you to be kind enough to transmit the expression of our gratitude and of our sincerest thanks.
It is very difficult for us to go to Sweden for the ceremonial meeting on December 10.
We cannot go away at that time of year without greatly upsetting the teaching which is confided to each of us. In case we went to the meeting we could only stay a very short time, and we should barely have time to make the acquaintance of the Swedish scientists.
And finally, Mme Curie has been ill this summer and is not yet completely recovered.
I wish to ask you to postpone the time of our journey and the lecture to a later date. We could go to Stockholm at Easter, for example, or, which would suit us better still, toward the middle of June.
Please accept, Mr Secretary, the assurance of our respect.
After these phrases of official courtesy we must quote another letter—unexpected and astonishing. Written by Marie in Polish, it was addressed to her brother. The date is worthy of remark: December 11, 1903, the day after the public meeting in Stockholm. The first day of fame! In this moment Marie should have been intoxicated by her triumph. Her adventure was indeed extraordinary: no woman had achieved renown in the difficult realm of science. She was the first, and for the moment the only, celebrated woman scientist in the world.
Marie Curie to Joseph Sklodovski, December 11, 1903:
DEAR JOSEPH,
I thank both of you most tenderly for your letters. Don’t forget to thank Manyusya (Joseph’s daughter) for her little letter, so well written, which gave me great pleasure. I shall answer her as soon as I have a free moment.
In the beginning of November I had a sort of grippe, from which I was left with a little cough. I went to see Dr Landrieux, who examined my lungs and found nothing wrong. But on the other hand, he accuses me of being anaemic. I feel strong, just the same, and I succeed in working more now than I did in the autumn, without too much fatigue.
My husband has been to London to receive the Davy Medal which has been given us. I did not go with him for fear of fatigue.
We have been given half of the Nobel Prize. I do not know exactly what that represents; I believe it is about seventy thousand francs. For us, it is a huge sum. I don’t know when we shall get the money, perhaps only when we go to Stockholm. We are obliged to lecture there during the six months following December 10.
We did not go to the ceremonial meeting because it was too complicated to arrange. I did not feel strong enough to undertake such a long journey (forty-eight hours without stopping, and more if one stops along the way) in such an inclement season, in a cold country. and without being able to stay there more than three or four days: we could not, without great difficulty, interrupt our courses for a long period.
We are inundated with letters and with visits from photographers and journalists. One would like to dig into the ground somewhere to find a little peace. We have received a proposal from America to go there and make a series of lectures on our work. They ask us what sum we wish to receive. Whatever the terms may be, we intend to refuse. With much effort we have avoided the banquets people wanted to organize in our honor. We refuse with the energy of despair, and people understand that there is nothing to be done.
My Irène is well. She is going to a little school rather far from the house. It is very difficult in Paris to find a good school for small children.
I kiss you all tenderly, and implore you not to forget me.
“We have been given the half of the Nobel Prize … I don’t know when we shall get the money.”
These words, written by a creature who had just willingly renounced wealth, assume a special value. The thunderous notoriety, the homage of press and public, official invitations and the bridge of gold offered from America, Marie only mentions with bitter complaints. This Nobel Prize, which suddenly made of Pierre Curie and herself a famous couple, represented in her eyes one thing only: seventy thousand gold francs. It was a recompense accorded by Swedish scientists to the work of two of their colleagues, and it was not “contrary to the scientific spirit” to accept it. A unique chance of releasing Pierre from his hours of teaching, of saving his health!
On January 2, 1904, the blessed check was paid in to the branch bank in the Avenue des Gobelins, which harbored the couple’s slender savings. Pierre at last could leave off teaching at the School of Physics, where an eminent physicist, Paul Langevin, his former pupil, was to replace him. The Curies took, at their own expense, a laboratory assistant: it was simpler and quicker than waiting for the phantom collaborators promised by the university. Marie sent twenty thousand Austrian crowns as a loan to the Dluskis, to help in the beginnings of their sanatorium. And the rest of the little fortune, which was soon to be swollen by the fifty thousand francs of the Osiris Prize, awarded half to Marie Curie and half to Edouard Branly, was evenly divided between French Rentes and bonds of the City of Warsaw.
In the black account book can be found the traces of a few other sumptuary expenses. There were presents in money and loans to Pierre’s brother, to Marie’s sisters—liberalities which the extreme discretion of their beneficiaries was to reduce to modest proportions. There were also subscriptions to scientific societies.
Gifts: to Polish students, to a childhood friend of Marie’s, to laboratory assistants, to a Sèvres girl in need.… Finding in her memory the name of a very poor woman who had once lovingly taught her French—a Mlle de St Aubin, now Mme Kozlovska, born in Dieppe, but settled and married in Poland—whose great dream was to see the land of her birth again, Marie wrote to her, invited her to France, received her in her house and paid for her journey from Warsaw to Paris and from Paris to Dieppe; the good lady was to speak of this immense unexpected joy with tears.
Marie bestowed such ingenious and subtle kindnesses judiciously, without fuss. She had no unmeasured generosities and no whims: she had decided to help those who needed her for as long as she lived. She wished to do so according to her means, so as to be able to continue to do so always.
She also thought of herself. She installed a “modern” bathroom in the house in the Boulevard Kellermann and repapered a little room which needed it. But it never entered her head to mark the occasion of the Nobel Prize by buying a new hat. And though she insisted on Pierre’s leaving the School of Physics, for her part she kept on with her teaching at Sèvres. She loved her pupils and felt strong enough to continue with the lessons which assured her of a salary.
It may be thought strange to enumerate so minutely the expenses of two scientists at the moment when Fame opened her arms to them. I ought perhaps to describe the mob of the curious and of the journalists of all countries who besieged the Curie house and the shed in the Rue Lhomond. I ought to count the telegrams which piled up on the huge worktable, the newspaper articles in their thousands, and depict the physicists posing for photographers.
MARIE AND PIERRE CURIE with Their Daughter Irène in 1904. (Illustration Credit 16.1)
MARIE CURIE AND HER TWO DAUGHTERS, EVE AND IRÈNE, IN 1908 (Illustration Credit 16.2)
I have no desire to do so. I know that the commotion which was now beginning brought my parents nothing but displeasure. We must seek for their satisfactions not in such evidence, but elsewhere: Pierre and Marie were happy to see their discovery appreciated at its worth by the members of the Swedish Academy, happy also to find, among the heaps of congratulations, enthusiastic messages from a few minds they admired. The joy of their relations moved them, and the seventy thousand francs which lightened the burden of daily drudgery were welcome. The rest—that “rest” for which men are capable of such effort, and often of such baseness—was nothing but misery and torment to them.
A permanent misunderstanding separated them from the public which turned its sympathy towards them. The Curies reached in this year of 1903 a moment which was perhaps the most pathetic of their lives. They were at an age where genius, served by experience, could give its maximum. They had successfully accomplished, in a barrack sodden with rain, the discovery of radium which astonished the world. But the mission was not finished: their brains contained the possibility of other unknown riches. They wanted to work; they had to work.
But fame took little account of the future towards which Pierre and Marie were straining. Fame leaps upon the great, hangs its full weight upon them, attempts to arrest their development. The publicity given the Nobel Prize fixed upon the couple of research workers the attention of millions of beings, men and women, philosophers, workers, professors, businessmen and people in society. These millions of beings offered their fervor to the Curies. But what pledges they claimed in exchange! The advantages which the scientists had presented them with in advance—the intellectual capital of the discovery, its power of help against a terrible evil—did not suffice for them. They consigned radioactivity, although it was still in an embryonic stage, to the class of acquired victories and busied themselves less with helping in its development than in savoring the picturesque details of its birth. They wished to break in upon the intimacy of the surprising couple about whom a double genius, a transparent life and a total disinterestedness were already creating a legend. Their eager homage rummaged through the existence of their idols—of their victims—and dispossessed them of the only treasures they wished to preserve: meditation and silence.
In the newspapers of the period, along with photographs of Pierre, or Marie (“a fair young woman, distinguished, slender in figure”—or “a charming mother whose exquisite sensibility is accompanied by a spirit curious about the unfathomable”) of their “adorable little girl” and of Didi, the alley cat rolled up into a ball before the stove in the dining room, there also appeared eloquent descriptions of the little house and of the laboratory, those retreats whose charm and chaste poverty the two physicists had wished to keep for themselves. The house in the Boulevard Kellermann became “the sage’s dwelling,” described as “a pretty house, far off in the unknown and solitary Paris, in the shadow of the fortifications, a house which harbors the intimate happiness of two great scientists.”
And the shed rose to honor:
Behind the Panthéon, in a narrow, dark and deserted street such as those shown in the etchings to illustrate melodramatic old novels, the Rue Lhomond, between black and fissured houses, beside a trembling pavement, a miserable barrack raises its wooden wall: it is the Municipal School of Physics and Chemistry.
I went through a courtyard, a lamentable enclosure which had endured the worst insults of time, and then through a solitary archway where my steps re-echoed, and found myself in a soggy blind alley where a twisted tree was dying in a corner between wooden planks. There extended several cabins of a sort, long, low, glassed-in, where I perceived small steady flames and glass instruments of various forms. No noise: a deep, melancholy silence; the echo of the town did not even enter here.
I knocked at a door chosen at random and entered a laboratory of astonishing simplicity: the floor was of rugged beaten earth, the walls of ruined plaster, the ceiling of rather shaky laths, and the light came in weakly through dusty windows. A young man, bent over a complicated piece of apparatus, lifted his head. “M. Curie,” he said, “is in there.” At once he resumed his work. Minutes went by. It was cold. Drops of water were falling from a tap. Two or three gas burners were alight.
Finally there entered a tall, thin man with a bony face and a rough gray beard, wearing a battered little cap. It was M. Curie.
(Echo de Paris, Paul Acker.)
Fame is an astonishing mirror, sometimes faithful, sometimes distorting like the convex glasses of an amusement park; it projects into space a thousand pictures of its chosen ones and takes possession of their least gestures to exalt them by caricature. The life of the Curies furnished fashionable “cabarets” with subjects for sketches: when the newspapers announced that M. and Mme Curie had accidentally lost part of their stock of radium, a skit played in a Montmartre theater promptly showed them locked up in their shed, allowing nobody to enter, sweeping the floor themselves and comically exploring every corner of the stage to find the lost substance.
And here is how the event was told by Marie:
Marie to Joseph Sklodovski:
A great misfortune has overtaken us recently: in the course of a delicate operation with radium, we lost an important quantity of our stock, and we still cannot understand the cause of the disaster. On this account I find myself forced to put off the work on the atomic weight of radium, which I should have begun by Easter. We are both of us in consternation.
In another letter, speaking of the radium which was her only care, she writes:
Marie to Joseph Sklodovski, December 23, 1903:
It is possible that we may succeed in preparing a greater quantity of this luckless substance. For this we need ore and money. We have the money now, but up to the present it has been impossible for us to get the ore. We are given some hope at the moment, and we shall probably be able to buy the necessary stock which was refused us before. The manufacture will therefore develop. But if you only knew how much time, patience and money must be spent to extract this tiny amount of radium from several tons of matter!
Such were Marie’s preoccupations thirteen days after the awarding of the Nobel Prize. In the course of these thirteen days the whole world had, in its turn, made a discovery: the Curies. A “great couple”! But Pierre and Marie did not get inside the skin of these new characters.
Pierre Curie to Georges Gouy, January 22, 1904:
MY DEAR FRIEND,
I wanted to write to you a long time ago; excuse me if I didn’t; it is because of the stupid life I am leading just now.
You have seen this sudden fad for radium. This has brought us all the advantages of a moment of popularity; we have been pursued by the journalists and photographers of every country on earth; they have even gone so far as to reproduce my daughter’s conversation with her nurse and to describe the black-and-white cat we have at home. Then we have received letters and visits from all the eccentrics, from all the unappreciated inventors … We have had a large number of requests for money. Last of all, collectors of autographs, snobs, society people and sometimes even scientists come to see us in the magnificent establishment in the Rue Lhomond which you know. With all this, there is not a moment of tranquillity in the laboratory, and a voluminous correspondence to be sent off every night. On this regime I can feel myself being overwhelmed by brute stupidity.…
The Curies, who had supported poverty, overwork and even the injustice of mankind without a complaint, now for the first time betrayed a strange nervousness. As their renown increased, this nervousness grew in proportion.
Pierre Curie to Georges Gouy, March 20, 1902:
… As you have been able to observe, fortune favors us at the moment; but the favors of fortune do not come without numerous worries. Never have we been less at peace. There are days when we have hardly the time to breathe. And to think that we had dreamed of living like wild people, far from human beings!
Pierre Curie to Charles Edouard Guillaume:
… We are asked for articles and lectures, and when several years have passed, the very people who are asking us for them would be astonished to see that we have done no work.…
Pierre Curie to Charles Edouard Guillaume, January 15, 1904:
MY DEAR FRIEND,
My lecture will take place on February 18; the newspapers were misinformed. To this piece of false news I owe 200 requests for tickets, to which I have given up replying.
Absolute and invincible inertia regarding Flammarion’s lecture. I long for calmer days passed in a quiet place, where lectures will be forbidden and newspapermen persecuted.
Marie Curie to Joseph Sklodovski, February 14, 1904:
… Always a hubbub. People are keeping us from work as much as they can. Now I have decided to be brave and I receive no visitors—but they disturb me just the same. Our life has been altogether spoiled by honors and fame.
Marie Curie to Joseph Sklodovski, March 19, 1904:
DEAR JOSEPH,
I send you my most affectionate greetings for your birthday. I wish you good health and success for all your family—and also that you may never be submerged by such a correspondence as inundates us at this moment, or by the assaults to which we are subjected.
I regret a little that I threw away the letters we received; they were instructive enough. There were sonnets and poems on radium, letters from various inventors, letters from spirits, philosophical letters. Yesterday an American wrote to ask if I would allow him to baptize a race horse with my name. And then, naturally, hundreds of requests for autographs and photographs. I hardly reply to these letters, but I lose time by reading them.
Marie Curie to her cousin Henrietta, spring of 1904:
Our peaceful and laborious existence is completely disorganized: I do not know if it will ever regain its equilibrium.
The irritation, the pessimism, and I might almost say the bitterness of these letters are not misleading: the scientists had lost their inner peace.
The fatigue resulting from an effort which surpassed our strength, and which had been imposed upon us by the unsatisfactory physical conditions of our work, was increased by the invasion of publicity [Marie was to write later]. The shattering of our voluntary isolation was a cause of real suffering to us and had all the effects of a disaster.
In compensation, fame should have brought the Curies certain advantages: the chair, the laboratory, the collaborators and the credits so long desired. But when would these benefactions come? Their anxious waiting was prolonged.…
Here we touch upon one of the essential causes of Pierre’s and Marie’s bitterness. France was the country where their worth had been recognized last, and nothing less than the Davy Medal and the Nobel Prize were required before the University of Paris bothered to create a chair in physics for Pierre Curie. The two scientists were saddened by this. The compensations which came from abroad underlined the desolate conditions under which they had successfully pursued the great discovery—conditions which did not seem likely to change soon.
Pierre thought of the positions which had been refused him for the past four years, and made it a point of honor to pay public homage to the only institution which had encouraged and supported his efforts within the poor means at its disposal: the School of Physics and Chemistry. In a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne before a large audience he was to say, as he recalled the bareness and magic of the old shed:
I wish to point out here that we made all our researches at the School of Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris.
In all scientific production the influence of the surroundings in which work is done has a very great importance, and part of the results obtained is due to this influence. For more than twenty years I have been working at the School of Physics. Schutzenberger, the first director of this school, was an eminent man of science. I remember with gratitude that he procured the means of work for me when I was only an assistant; later on, he permitted Mme Curie to come and work with me, an authorization which, at that time, was an innovation far out of the ordinary. The present directors, MM. Lauth and Gariel, have kept up the same kindliness toward me.
The professors of the school and the pupils who have finished their studies constitute a benevolent and productive circle which was very useful to me. It is among the former pupils of the school that we found our collaborators and friends, and I am happy to be able to thank them all here.
The aversion which celebrity inspired in the Curies had still other sources besides their passion for work or their fright at the loss of time.
With Pierre, who was naturally detached, the attack of popularity encountered the resistance of principles he had always held. He hated hierarchies and classifications. He found it absurd that there should be “firsts” in a class, and the decorations which grown persons coveted seemed to him as superfluous as the medals awarded children in school. This attitude, which had made him refuse the Legion of Honor, was equally his in the realm of science. He was devoid of all spirit of competition, and in the “race for discoveries” he was able to endure being beaten by his colleagues without annoyance. “What difference does it make if I didn’t publish such-and-such a work,” he had the habit of saying, “since somebody else has published it?”
This almost inhuman indifference had had a deep influence on Marie. But when she fled before the evidences of admiration it was not in order to imitate her husband and not to obey him. The war against fame was not a principle with her: it was an instinct. An irresistible timidity, a painful shrinking congealed her as soon as curious glances were fastened upon her, and even provoked disturbances which brought on dizziness and physical discomfort.
Also, her existence was too crowded with obligations for her to squander a single atom of energy uselessly. Carrying the full weight of her work, of her household, of motherhood and teaching all at once, Mme Curie advanced on her difficult road like an acrobat. Only one more “part” to play, and the equilibrium was gone: she fell from the tight rope. Wife, mother, scientist, teacher, Marie had not one second of time available for playing the part of the celebrated woman.
By differing routes, Pierre and Marie thus arrived at the same position of refusal. One might imagine that creatures who had accomplished a great work together might receive fame in different ways. Pierre might have been distant, Marie vain … Nothing of the sort occurred. The two souls, like the two brains, were of equal quality. After all their trials the couple traversed this one too, victoriously, and in their withdrawal from honors they remained united.
I must confess that I have sought with passion for some disobedience to a law which I found cruel. I should have liked to feel that such prodigious success, a scientific reputation without precedent for a woman, had brought my mother some moments of happiness. That this unique adventure should have made its heroine suffer constantly seemed to me too unjust, and I should have given a great deal to find at the end of a letter, in the midst of a confidence, some movement of selfish pride, a cry or a sigh of victory.
It was a childish hope. Marie, promoted to the rank of “the celebrated Mme Curie,” was still to be happy at times, but only in the silence of her laboratory or the intimacy of her home. Day after day, she made herself dimmer, more effaced, more anonymous, in order to escape from those who would have dragged her onto the stage, to avoid being the “star” in whom she could never have recognized herself. For many long years, to unknown persons who came up to her, asking with insistence, “Aren’t you Madame Curie?” she was to reply in a neutral voice, dominating a little spasm of fear and condemning herself to impassibility, “No, you are mistaken.”
In the presence of her admirers, or of the potentates of the day, who now treated her like a sovereign, she—like her husband—showed only astonishment, lassitude, an impatience more or less covered over and, above all, boredom: the crushing, mortal boredom which dragged her down when people rambled on about her discovery and her genius.
One anecdote out of a thousand sums up beautifully the response of the Curies to what Pierre called “the favors of fortune.” The couple were dining at the Elysée Palace with President Loubet. In the course of the evening a lady came up to Marie and asked:
“Would you like me to present you to the King of Greece?”
Marie, innocently and politely, replied in her gentle voice, all too sincere:
“I don’t see the utility of it.”
She perceived the lady’s stupefaction—and also, with horror, perceived that the lady, whom she had not recognized, was in fact Mme Loubet. She blushed, caught herself up, and said precipitately:
“But—but—naturally, I shall do whatever you please. Just as you please.”
The Curies, who had always liked to “live like wild people,” now had another reason for seeking solitude: they were fleeing from the curious. More than ever they haunted isolated villages, and if they had to pass the night in a country inn they registered there under a false name.
But their best disguise was still their natural appearance. To look at this tall, ungainly man, carelessly dressed, leading his bicycle along some hollow road in Brittany, and the young woman who accompanied him, accoutered like a peasant girl, who could imagine them to be the laureates of the Nobel Prize?
Even the most knowing had difficulty in recognizing them. An American journalist, having cleverly followed the trail of the physicists and found them at Le Pouldu, stopped, perplexed, in front of their fisherman’s cottage. His newspaper had sent him to interview Mme Curie, the illustrious scientist. Where could she be? He would have to find out from somebody … From this woman, for instance, who was sitting barefoot on the stone steps at the door, shaking the sand out of her bathing shoes.
The woman lifted her head, fixed her ash-gray eyes on the intruder … and all at once she resembled a hundred or a thousand photographs that had appeared in the press. It was she! The reporter was stunned for a moment, and then dropped down beside Marie and drew out his notebook.
Seeing that flight was impossible, she resigned herself, and answered her interlocutor’s questions by short phrases. Yes, Pierre Curie and she had discovered radium. Yes, they were continuing their work.
Meanwhile she brandished her sandals, beat them against the stone to empty them thoroughly, and then put them back on her fine bare feet scratched by rocks and brambles. Magnificent occasion for a journalist! A scene of “intimacy” sketched from life, by the luckiest of chances.… Quickly the good reporter took advantage of it and posed some questions of a less general nature. If he could get some confidences about Marie’s youth, her methods of work, or the psychology of a woman devoted to research …
But at that moment the surprising face was turned from him. In one single sentence which she was to repeat often as a sort of motto, which depicted character, existence and vocation—a sentence which tells more than a whole book—Marie put an end to the conversation:
“In science we must be interested in things, not in persons.”
* Professor Aurivillius was the secrétaire perpetuel of the Swedish Academy of Science, a position of great eminence and authority, which the English word “secretary” hardly conveys.