THE WORLD FOUND its calm again. Marie, with a confidence and hope which were to grow weaker and weaker, followed from afar the labors of those who were organizing the peace.
Very naturally, this idealist was bound to be attracted by the Wilsonian doctrines and to have faith in the League of Nations. She obstinately sought remedies for the barbarity of the peoples and dreamed of a treaty which would truly efface rancor and hatred. “Either the Germans must be exterminated to the last man, which I could scarcely advocate,” she sometimes said, “or else they must be given a peace which they can endure.”
Relations between the scientists of the conquered and the conquering countries were resumed. Mme Curie showed a sincere will to forget the recent struggle. At the same time she refrained from the premature manifestations of fraternity and enthusiasm in which some of her colleagues engaged. She was inclined to ask, before she would see a German physicist: “Did he sign the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three?” If he did, she would be polite and no more. If not, she was more friendly, and talked freely of science with her confrère as if the war had not taken place.
This fact, of only temporary consequence, illustrates Marie’s very high idea of the role and duties of intellectuals in times of trouble. She did not think that great minds could remain “above the battle”: for four years she had served France loyally, she had saved human lives. But there were certain acts in which she could not acknowledge the intellectuals’ right to complicity. Mme Curie blamed the writers and scientists of beyond the Rhine for signing the Manifesto, just as, later on, she was to blame the Russian scientists who publicly approved the procedure of the Soviet police: an intellectual betrayed his mission if he was not the most constant defender of civilization and freedom of thought.
THE RADIUM INSTITUTE AT WARSAW (Illustration Credit 22.1)
THE RADIUM INSTITUTE AT PARIS (Illustration Credit 22.2)
MME CURIE, IRÈNE CURIE AND PUPILS FROM THE AMERICAN EXPEDITIONARY CORPS, AT THE INSTITUTE OF RADIUM IN PARIS, 1919 (Illustration Credit 22.3)
Marie had become neither a warmonger nor a partisan by taking her part in the great struggle. It is a pure scientist that we find, in 1919, at the head of her laboratory.
She had looked forward with fervor to the moment when the buildings in the Rue Pierre Curie would hum with activity. Her first care was not to spoil the exceptional work accomplished during the war: the service of emanations, the distribution of “active” little tubes to the hospitals, continued under the direction of Dr Regaud, who had taken possession of the biological building again on demobilization. In the physical section, Mme Curie and her fellow workers applied themselves to the experiments interrupted in 1914 and began some new ones.
A more normal life allowed the aging woman to give more time to the future of Irène and Eve—two sturdy girls, bigger than she was. The elder, a student of twenty-one, calm and marvelously balanced, had never hesitated for an instant over her vocation: she would be a physicist, and she wanted, very definitely, to study radium. The fame and the achievement of her parents neither discouraged nor intimidated her. With a simplicity and naturalness worthy of admiration, Irène Curie set out on the road that had been followed by Pierre and Marie. She did not ask whether her career would be as brilliant as her mother’s or not; she did not feel oppressed by a name too great. Her sincere love of science, her gifts, inspired in her only one ambition: to work forever in that laboratory which she had seen go up, and in which, as early as 1918, she had been named assistant.*
Marie’s personal experience and the happy example of Irène made it too easy for her to believe that young creatures can find their direction in the labyrinth of life without trouble. She was disconcerted by Eve’s anguish, her veering and tacking about. A noble and excessive respect for the free will of the young, an overestimate of their wisdom, kept her from exercising her authority upon this adolescent. She would have liked Eve, well gifted in science, to become a doctor and to study the medical applications of radium. Nevertheless, she did not impose that course upon the child. With tireless sympathy she supported each of her daughter’s capricious plans in turn, rejoiced to see her studying music, and left the choice of her teachers and her methods of work to herself.… She was bestowing too much freedom upon a being undermined by doubt, who would have done better to obey firm indications. How could she perceive her error, she who had been led to her destiny, in spite of immense obstacles, by the infallible instinct of genius?
Her tenderness was to watch to the very end over these very different daughters whom she had brought into the world, without ever showing a preference between them. Irène and Eve were to find in her, in all circumstances of their lives, a protector and an ardent ally. Later on, when Irène was married and had children in her turn, Marie was to surround the two generations with her loving care:
Marie to Irène and Frédéric Joliot-Curie, December 29, 1928:
My dear children, I send you my best wishes for a happy New Year—that is to say, a year of good health, good humor and good work, a year in which you will have pleasure in living every day, without waiting for the days to be gone before finding charm in them, and without putting all hope of pleasure in the days to come. The older one gets the more one feels that the present must be enjoyed: it is a precious gift, comparable to a state of grace.
I am thinking of your little Hélène, and forming wishes for her happiness. It is so moving to see the evolution of this little creature who expects everything from you with unlimited confidence, and who certainly believes that you can interpose between her and all suffering. One day she will know that your power does not extend so far—nevertheless one could wish to be able to do that for one’s children. At the very least one owes them every effort to give them good health, a peaceful and serene childhood in surroundings of affection, in which their fine confidence will last as long as possible,
Marie to her daughters, September 3, 1919:
… I often think of the year of work that is opening before us. I think also of each of you, and of the sweetness, joys and cares you give me. You are in all truth a great fortune to me, and I hope life still holds for me a few good years of existence in common with you.
Whether it was that her health had grown better after the exhausting years of the war, or that the appeasement of age was beginning, Marie became more serene after her fiftieth year. The grip of sorrow and illness was relaxed and the torments of old were deadened by time: Marie did not find her happiness again, but she learned to love the little joys of daily life. Irène and Eve, who had grown up in the shadow of a woman forever struggling against illness, discovered a new companion now, with an older face but a younger heart and body. Irène, an indefatigable sportswoman, encouraged her mother to imitate her exploits, took long excursions on foot with her, and carried her off to skate, to ride horseback, and even to ski a little.
In the summer Marie joined her daughters in Brittany. In the village of Larcouëst, in a part of the country undisturbed by the vulgar crowd, the three friends passed enchanted holidays.
The population of this hamlet on the Channel coast near Paimpol was composed entirely of sailors, peasants and of professors at the Sorbonne. The discovery of Larcouëst by the historian Charles Seignobos and the biologist Louis Lapicque in 1895 assumed the importance of Christopher Columbus’ first journey to the group of university people. Mme Curie, a latecomer in this colony of learned men which a witty journalist was to nickname “Port Science,” lived at first in the house of one of the villagers, then rented a villa and finally bought one. She had chosen the most isolated and wind-swept place on the moor, dominating a tranquil sea dotted with innumerable large or tiny islands which kept the waves of the open sea from approaching the coast. She had a love for lighthouses; the summer dwellings she rented and those which she was later to build all looked alike: a narrow house on a big field, rooms badly arranged, almost poorly furnished—and a sublime view.
The rare passers-by whom Marie met every morning—stoop-shouldered Breton women, slow-moving peasants, children whose smiles showed spoiled teeth—pronounced a sonorous “Bonjour, Madame Cû-û-ûrie,” in which the Breton accent made the syllables drag. And—oh, miracle!—Marie, without attempting to run away, smiled and answered in the same tone: “Bonjour, Madame Le Goff.… Bonjour, Monsieur Quintin,” or simply “bonjour” if, to her shame, she did not recognize her interlocutor. It is only after due consideration that the natives of a village accord these tranquil greetings, from equal to equal, in which there is neither indiscretion nor curiosity, but friendship alone. The mark of esteem had not come to Marie because of radium or because “her name was in the papers.” She had been judged worthy of it after two or three seasons, when the women with their hair tight drawn under pointed white caps had recognized in her one of their own, a peasant.
Mme Curie’s house was only a dwelling like all others. The house in Larcouëst that really counted, the center of the colony, the palace of fashion, was a low, thatched cottage dressed to the roof in Virginia creeper, passion flowers and giant fuchsia. The cottage was called, in Breton, Taschen-Vihan: “the little orchard.” Taschen possessed a sloping garden in which the flowers, planted without apparent design, formed long rows of bursting color. Except when the east wind blew, the door of the house was always wide open. There dwelt a young sorcerer of seventy, Charles Seignobos, professor of history at the Sorbonne. He was a very small, very active old man, a trifle humpbacked, perpetually dressed in a suit of white flannel with thin black lines, patched and discolored. The people of the country called him “Monsieur Seigno” and his friends called him “Captain.” Words cannot indicate the charming devotion of which he was the object, nor above all by what characteristics of his nature he had deserved the veneration, tenderness and comradeship which surrounded him. This elderly bachelor had always had all men’s friendship, and more wives than any pasha: thirty, forty companions, of ages from two to eighty.…
Marie went down to Taschen by a steep trail dominating the bay of Launay. Some fifteen initiates were already collected in front of the house, dawdling as they waited for the daily embarkation for the islands. The appearance of Mme Curie aroused no emotion in this assembly, which was a sort of cross between a convoy of emigrants and a troupe of gypsies. Charles Seignobos, whose charming eyes were concealed behind the glasses of the nearsighted, saluted her with crusty friendliness: “Ah! Here’s Madame Curie! Bonjour, bonjour!” A few other bonjours echoed, and Marie, sitting down on the ground, took her place in the circle.
She wore a hat of washed-out linen, an old skirt and the indestructible swanskin pea jacket which the woman “tailor” of the village, Elisa Leff, made according to a model which was the same for men and women, scientists and fishermen. Her feet were bare, in sandals. She placed in front of her a bag like fifteen other bags scattered about the grass, swollen with her bathrobe and bathing suit.
A reporter suddenly finding himself in the midst of the peaceful group would have been overjoyed. He would have had to take great care not to step on some member of the Institute of France, lazily stretched out on the ground, or not to kick a Nobel Prize winner. Abilities abounded.… If you wanted to talk physics there were Jean Perrin, Marie Curie, André Debierne, Victor Auger. Mathematics, integral calculus? Apply to Émile Borel, draped in his bathrobe like a Roman emperor in his toga. Biology, astrophysics? Louis Lapicque or Charles Maurain could answer you. And as for the enchanter, Charles Seignobos, the numerous children of the colony whispered to each other in terror that he “knew all his history.” …
But the miraculous thing about this assembly of scholars was that nobody ever talked physics, history, biology or mathematics. Respect, hierarchies and even the conventions of politeness were forgotten here. Here, humanity was no longer divided into pontiffs and disciples, old and young; it was composed of exactly four categories of individuals. These were: the “philistines,” the uninitiate strangers who strayed into the clan and had to be expelled as soon as possible; the “elephants,” who were friends without great gifts for a nautical life, tolerated but made the victims of endless jokes; and then the Larcouëstians who were worthy of that name, the “sailors.” Last of all came the super-sailors, technical experts on the currents in the bay, virtuosi of the crawl and of the rudder, denominated “crocodiles.” Mme Curie, who had never been a “philistine,” could hardly hope to attain the title of “crocodile.” She had become a “sailor” after a short term as “elephant.”
Charles Seignobos counted his flock and gave the signal for departure. From the flotilla anchored near the shore—two sailboats and five or six rowboats—Eve Curie and Jean Maurain, the cabin boys on duty, had detached this morning’s choice, the “big boat” and the “English boat,” and had sculled them alongside, where the capriciously cut rocks served as a natural landing place. The troop of navigators was already on the bank. Seignobos, in his abrupt, gay and sarcastic voice, cried out: “All aboard! All aboard!” And, as the boats filled with passengers: “Which is the first crew? I’ll row stroke! Madame Curie will row bow, Perrin and Borel go to the oars, and Francis will steer.”
These orders, which would have left many intellectuals perplexed, were immediately followed. Four oarsmen—all four professors at the Sorbonne and celebrities—settled themselves on the banks and waited submissively for the orders of young Francis Perrin, the omnipotent master on board, since he was at the rudder. Charles Seignobos gave the first stroke and indicated the rhythm to his crew. Behind him, Jean Perrin pulled on his oar with such force that he made the boat swirl around. Émile Borel was behind Perrin, and behind Borel, in the bow, was Marie Curie, sounding off in cadence.
The white-and-green boat advanced regularly across the sunny sea. Severe but just criticisms by the young coxswain broke the silence: “Number two is slacking!” (Émile Borel tried to deny his fault, but soon resigned himself, and, forgetting his laziness, pulled harder at the oar.) “Bow is not following stroke!” (Marie Curie, confused, corrected her error and applied herself to the rhythm.)
Mme Charles Maurain’s beautiful, warm voice started the first notes of a “rowing song” soon taken up in chorus by the passengers packed in behind:
A light northwest wind—the wind for fine weather—carried the slow, cadenced melody toward the second boat, which had made headway and could be seen on the other side of the bay. The oarsmen in the English boat in their turn set up a chant, one of those three or four hundred old songs which formed the colony’s repertory, and which Charles Seignobos taught to each new generation of Larcouëstians.
Two or three songs brought the big boat to the point of La Trinité. The helmsman consulted his watch and cried: “The relief!” He did not care whether the oarsmen were tired or not, but the regulation ten minutes had passed since the start, and Marie Curie, Perrin, Borel and Seignobos gave up their places to four other members of the higher educational system. A new crew was needed to cut across the violent current in the channel and reach Roch Vras, the big violet-colored rock, the deserted island where, nearly every morning, the Larcouëstians came to bathe.
The men undressed near the empty boats, on the beach covered with brown seaweed, the women in a corner carpeted with slick, rubbery weeds, which had been called “the ladies’ cabin” since the beginning. Marie reappeared among the first, in her black bathing suit, and made for the sea. The bank was steep, and no sooner had one plunged into the water than the bottom disappeared.
The picture of Marie Curie swimming at Roch Vras in that cool deep water of ideal purity and transparence is one of the most delightful memories I have of my mother. She did not practice the “crawl” her daughters and their comrades loved. Methodically trained by Irène and Eve, she had learned an overarm stroke in good style. Her innate elegance and grace had done the rest. You forgot her gray hair, hidden under the bathing cap, and her wrinkled face, in admiring the slim, supple body, the pretty white arms and the lively, charming gestures of a young girl.
Mme Curie was extremely proud of her agility and of her aquatic talents; between her colleagues at the Sorbonne and herself there existed a concealed rivalry in sport. Marie observed scientists and their wives, in the little cove of Roch Vras, who swam with a respectable overhand stroke, or who floated in one place, flopping desperately, powerless to advance. She implacably counted the distances covered by her adversaries, and, without ever openly proposing a race, she put herself in training to break the records of speed and distance held by the university teaching body. Her daughters were at the same time her teachers and her confidants:
“I think I can swim better than Monsieur Borel,” Marie sometimes remarked.
“Oh, a lot better, Mé. There isn’t any comparison!”
“Jean Perrin gave a fine performance today. But I’d been farther than that yesterday, do you remember?”
“I saw you. It was very good. You’ve made great progress since last year.”
She adored these compliments, which she knew to be sincere. At more than fifty years of age, she was one of the best swimmers of her generation.
After her swim she would warm herself in the sun, eating a bit of dry bread as she waited for the moment to go back. She made happy little exclamations: “How good it is!” Or else, before the thrilling picture of rocks, sky and water: “How beautiful!” Such brief judgments were the only comments upon Larcouëst that its colonists would tolerate. It was so well understood that this was the most delightful place in the world, that the sea was bluer here—yes, blue, as blue as in the Mediterranean—and more hospitable, more varied than anywhere else, that nobody ever spoke of it, any more than one could have spoken of the scientific genius of the notable Larcouëstians. Only “philistines” would wax lyrical over these subjects, and that not for long in the face of the general irony.
Noon. The sea was drained away and the boats navigated prudently by the “Anterren channel” between blocks of weeds that looked like wet pastures. For the thousandth time the passengers noted the exact spot where the same boat, coming back from the same trip, had been caught by the ebb tide and marooned for four hours while its famished crew explored the deserted weeds in the hope of finding smelts or shellfish. Song succeeded song, relief followed relief. Here at last, below the house of Taschen, was the shore, the landing place—or rather the bank of seaweed which served as landing place at low tide. Feet and legs bare, sandals and bathrobe brandished aloft, Marie lifted her skirt and made her way bravely toward dry land through a black, smelly ooze in which she sank above the ankles. Any Larcouëstian who, through deference for her age, should have offered her help or asked to carry her bag, would have provoked her astonishment and disapproval. Nobody helped anybody here, and Article I of the law of the clan enjoined: “Take care of yourself!”
The sailors separated and went to lunch. At two o’clock they would meet again at Taschen for the daily trip on the Eglantine, the white-sailed yacht without which Larcouëst would not be Larcouëst. Mme Curie, this time, failed to answer the call. The idleness of a sailboat wearied her. Alone in her lighthouse, deserted by her daughters, she would correct some scientific publication or else, getting out her tools, her spade and her pruning scissors, she would work in the garden. From these combats with the gorse and the briars, these mysterious plantation labors, she emerged scratched until the blood came, her legs striped with cuts, her hands earthy and full of thorns. It was a lucky day when the damage was no worse. Irène and Eve sometimes found their enterprising mother with a sprained ankle or a finger half crushed by a misdirected blow of the hammer.
Toward six o’clock Marie went down the landing for a second bath and then, dressed again, she would go into Taschen by the ever-opened door. In an armchair, behind the wide window which gave on the bay, was seated a very old, very witty and very pretty woman, Mme Marillier. She lived in the house and, from this place, watched every evening for the navigators’ return. Marie waited with her until the sails of the Eglantine appeared on the paling sea gilded by the setting sun. After the work of disembarkation the troop of passengers climbed up the trail. There were Irène and Eve, with bronzed arms, in their cheap little dresses, their hair ornamented by red pinks from the garden which Charles Seignobos, according to an unalterable tradition, had given them before the trip started. Their shining glances spoke of the intoxication of an excursion to the mouth of the Trieux or to the isle of Modez, where the short grass incited to exhausting games of prisoner’s base. Everybody, even the seventy-year-old captain, took part in this game, in which diplomas and Nobel prizes counted for nothing. Scientists who were swift kept all their prestige, but the less agile ones had to endure the condescension of the “leaders” on each side and, in the exchange of prisoners, were treated like a rabble of slaves.
These customs of children or savages, living half naked in the water and the wind, were later to become the fashion and to intoxicate all classes from the richest to the poorest. But in those years just after the war they aroused the shocked criticisms of the uninitiate. In advance of the fashion by some fifteen years, we discovered beach life, swimming races, sun bathing, camping out on deserted islands, the tranquil immodesty of sport. Little thought was given to appearance: a bathing suit a hundred times mended, a pea jacket, two pairs of sandals, and two or three cotton dresses made at home, formed the summer wardrobe of Irène and Eve. Later on, in a decadent Larcouëst invaded by “philistines” and—oh, horror—robbed of its poetry by belching motorboats, coquetry was to make its first appearance.
After dinner Mme Curie, wrapped in a shaggy monk’s cloak that she had owned for fifteen or twenty years, strode up and down, arm in arm with her daughters. By dark trails the three figures reached Taschen—always Taschen! In the common room, for the third time in the day, the Larcouëstians were assembled. They were playing “letters” around the big table. Marie, one of the cleverest at forming complicated words with paper letters drawn from a sack, was rated as a champion: the others quarreled over which side should claim her. Other colonists grouped around the petroleum lamps read or played checkers.
On gala days, amateur actor-authors played charades, songs with action, and revues in which the heroic events of the season were celebrated: an exciting race between two rival crews; the dangerous transportation of an enormous rock which had obstructed the landing place—an operation on a big scale, carried out by a body of highly excited technical experts; the misdeeds of the east wind, reviled by all; a tragic-comic shipwreck; the crimes of a ghostly badger, periodically accused of devastating the kitchen garden at Taschen.…
How is one to suggest the unique charm made of light, of songs, childish laughter, fine silences, of a free and unconstrained comradeship between young people and their elders? This existence in which hardly anything ever happened, which cost almost nothing, and in which every day was like the day before, was to leave the richest of memories to Marie Curie and her daughters. In spite of the simplicity of the setting, it was always to represent to them the last word in luxury. No millionaire, on any beach, has been able to make the ocean yield up pleasures more vivid, rarer or more delicate than the clear-eyed sportsmen of the Sorbonne did in this corner of Brittany. And since the setting for the adventure was only a charming village—charming like a great many others, no doubt—the merit of the striking success must be attributed to the scientists who met there every year.
Several times, in writing this biography, I have asked myself if the reader, thinking of other things he has read, will not stop to murmur, with a smile of irony: “Lord, what ‘nice people’ they all are! What candid hearts, what sympathy and confidence!”
Well, yes. “Sympathetic characters” abound in this story. It is not my fault: they existed, and just as I have tried to depict them. Marie’s companions, from those who witnessed her birth to the friends of her last days, would furnish very poor subjects for analysis to our novelists with their liking for dark colors. Strange, abnormal families, these Sklodovskis and Curies, in which parents and children did not hate each other, in which human beings were guided by tenderness, in which nobody listened at doors or dreamed of treacheries and inheritances, in which nobody murdered anybody—in which everybody was, in fact, perfectly honest! Strange circles, these groups of French and Polish university people, imperfect like all human groups, but devoted to one ideal which was never to be altered by bitterness or perfidy.…
I have spread the trump cards of our Breton happiness upon the table. Perhaps shoulders may be shrugged at the thought that neither snobbishness nor quarrels ever secretly animated these enchanted summers. At Larcouëst the most penetrating observer would have been quite incapable of distinguishing the great scientist from the modest research worker, the rich man from the poor. Never once, in the sun and waves of Brittany, did I hear anybody speak of money. Our elder, Charles Seignobos, gave us the highest tacit lesson: without proclaiming himself the champion of theories or of doctrines, this liberal old man had made his property the property of us all. The house-with-the-opened-door, the yacht Eglantine, the rowing boats, all belonged to him and still belong to him, but nobody is less their proprietor than himself. And when there was a dance in his dwelling, lighted by fluted paper lamps with candles inside, and the accordion played polkas, lancers and Breton peasant dances, the whirling couples were mixed without distinction of servants and employers, members of the Institute of France and the daughters of farmers, Breton sailors and Parisiennes.
Our mother was a silent witness of these festivals. Her friends, who knew the vulnerable point of her timid character, so reserved and almost severe to approach, never failed to tell her that Irène danced well or that Eve had on a pretty dress. And then suddenly, on the worn face of Marie Curie, there would appear an ingenuous and exquisite smile of pride.