WHEN MARIE CAME HOME from some brilliant journey, one of her daughters would go to meet her on the station platform, watching for the appearance—at a window of the “wagon de luxe”—of that busy, poverty-stricken figure that Mme Curie was to remain until the end. The wanderer had a firm, cautious grip on her big handbag of brown leather, always the same one, given her years ago by an association of Polish women. It was swollen with papers, portfolios, and eyeglass cases. In the crook of her arm Marie carried a bunch of fading flowers, stiff and commonplace, which somebody had given her along the way; however troublesome they might be, she never dared to throw them out.
Relieved of her burdens, the scientist climbed up the three high stories—without a lift—in her house on the Île Saint-Louis. And while she examined her mail, Eve, kneeling on the floor in front of her, opened bags, unpacked for her.
She discovered, mixed in with the familiar clothing, pointed copes of velvet and silk, the emblems of new doctorates honoris causa; leather boxes containing medals; rolls of parchment and—more precious than all the rest—the menus of banquets, which Marie always cherished jealously. They were so convenient and so suitable, being made of thick, hard cardboard, for scribbling calculations in mathematics!
At last, with a crackle of unfolding tissue paper, appeared the “souvenirs” and presents for Irène and Eve, purchased by Marie. She had picked them out for their strangeness, their humbleness.
Bits of “petrified wood” from Texas became paperweights, blades of damascene from Toledo served to cut scientific books, and carpets of rough wool, woven by Polish mountaineers, were used to cover little tables. At the neck of Marie’s black blouses were hung tiny jewels brought back from the Grand Canyon: these bits of crude silver, on which the Indians had cut lines of zigzag lightning, were, with a clasp of Bohemian garnet, a chain of gold filigree and a very pretty old-fashioned amethyst brooch, the only jewels my mother ever possessed. I doubt if all of them put together could have been sold for more than three hundred francs.
That apartment on the Quai de Béthune, very large and not very comfortable, all made of corridors and inside staircases, was a strange sort of family dwelling: twenty-two years of Mme Curie’s life were passed there. The imposing rooms of a house dating from the time of Louis XIV called in vain for the majestic armchairs and sofas that would have suited their proportions and their style. The mahogany furniture inherited from Dr Curie was grouped at random in the huge drawing room—which was big enough for fifty but rarely held more than four—upon the skating rink of a fine waxed parquet which creaked and complained under one’s footsteps. Neither carpets nor curtains: the high windows, on which the shutters were never closed, were barely veiled by thin net. Marie hated hangings, carpets and draperies. She liked a shining floor and naked glass windows that could not steal one ray of the sun from her. She wanted the Seine, the quais and the Île-de-la-Cité—an admirable view—complete and unimpaired.
For years she had been too poor to make a beautiful dwelling place for herself. Now she had lost the desire to do so, and for that matter had no time to spend in altering the hasty simplicity of her life’s background. However, successive alluvial deposits of gifts came to decorate the light, empty rooms. There were to be seen there some water colors of flowers, sent to Mme Curie by an anonymous admirer, a Copenhagen vase with bluish lights in it—the biggest and finest from the factory—a green and brown carpet given by a Roumanian manufacturer, a silver vase with a pompous inscription.… The only acquisition Marie had made was the grand piano she had bought for Eve, upon which the young girl worked for hours at a time, without ever causing Mme Curie to complain of the terrible deluge of arpeggios.
Irène had inherited the maternal indifference and, up to the time of her marriage, made herself perfectly comfortable in this icy apartment. In a big room which was her own lair, Eve made attempts at decoration—often disastrous—and renewed them as frequently as the state of her finances would permit.
The only room in the house that produced the emotion of life was Marie’s workroom. A portrait of Pierre Curie, glassed-in shelves of scientific books, and a few pieces of old furniture created an atmosphere of nobility there.
This dwelling, chosen from all other possible dwellings for its calm, was one of the noisiest in the world. The pianist’s scales, the strident call of the telephone, the marauding of the black cat whose specialty was cavalry charges through the corridors, and the robust clangor of the doorbell echoed and were magnified between these high walls. The insistent roaring of tugboats on the Seine used to draw Eve, young and lonely, to the window where she pressed her forehead against the glass and counted the steamers by groups. Family group of the Musketeers: Athos, Porthos.… Family of birds: Martin, Linnet, Swallow.…
In the morning, before eight o’clock, the noisy activity of an untrained servant and the light, hurried step of Mme Curie woke the household. At a quarter to nine Mme Curie’s little closed car stopped on the quay in front of the house and three honks of the klaxon resounded. Marie flung on her hat and coat and hastened downstairs. The laboratory was waiting for her.
The government’s national pension and an annuity provided by American generosity had dissipated material cares. Mme Curie’s income, which might have been considered absurdly small by many people, sufficed to assure her comfort, although she profited little by it. She never learned how to be waited upon by a maid. She could never make her chauffeur wait more than a few minutes without feeling vaguely guilty. And if she went into a shop with Eve, she never looked at the prices, but with infallible instinct she would point out, with her nervous hands, the simplest dress and the cheapest hat: these were the ones that pleased her.
She enjoyed spending money only for plants and stones, country houses. She built two such houses: one at Larcouëst and the other in the south. As age came on she went to the Mediterranean for a more ardent sun and warmer sea than in Brittany. To sleep in the open on the terrace of her villa at Cavalaire, to contemplate the view of the bay and of the isles of Hyères, to plant eucalyptus, mimosa and cypress on hillside gardens, were new joys to her. Two friends, two charming neighbors, Mme Sallenave and Mlle Clément, admired her aquatic feats with a little terror. Marie bathed among jagged rocks, swimming from one to the other, and minutely described her adventures for her daughters:
The bathing is good, but one has to go a long way for it [she writes]. Today I bathed between the rocks that overlook La Vigie—but what a climb!!! The sea has been calm for three days and I observe that I can swim for a long time, covering good distances. A distance of three hundred meters does not in the least frighten me in a calm sea, and no doubt I could do more.
Her dream would have been to abandon Paris and pass the winter at Sceaux, as in the old days. She bought land there and talked of building a house on it. The years passed without a decision being made; and every day, at lunchtime, she could be seen coming home on foot from the laboratory, crossing the bridge of La Tournelle with a step almost as lively as of yore, and, a little breathless, climbing the stairs of the old house in the Île Saint-Louis.
When Eve was a child and Irène, Mme Curie’s young assistant, lived and worked constantly with her mother, meals around the thick round table were often reduced to scientific dialogues between the scientist and her elder daughter. Technical formulæ struck Eve’s ears, and she interpreted these transcendent propositions in her own way. The little girl derived great satisfaction, for example, from certain algebraic terms employed by her mother and sister: BB “prime” (BB) and Bb “square” (Bb2).* These unknown babies of whom Marie and Irène Curie were forever talking must be charming, Eve thought.… But why square babies? And prime babies—what were their privileges?
One morning in 1926 Irène calmly announced to her family her engagement to Frédéric Joliot, the most brilliant and the most high-spirited of the workers at the Institute of Radium. The existence of the household was turned upside down. A man, a young man suddenly appeared in this female household where, except for a few familiars (such as André Debierne, Maurice Curie, the Perrins, the Borels and the Maurains), nobody ever penetrated. The young couple at first lived in the Quai de Béthune and then migrated to an independent flat. Marie, content at the visible happiness of her daughter, but disconcerted at not being able to live every hour with her working companion, tried in vain to conceal her inner dismay.
And then, when daily intimacy had made her better acquainted with Frédéric Joliot, the student who had become her son-in-law, and she was able to appreciate the exceptional qualities of the handsome, talkative boy brimming with vitality, she perceived that all was for the best. Two assistants instead of one could share her worries, discuss the research under way, receive her advice—and soon even make suggestions to her, bring her new ideas. “The Joliots” very naturally got into the habit of coming to lunch with Mme Curie four times a week.
And again, over the round table, they talked about “babies square” and “babies prime.”
“Aren’t you going to the laboratory, Mé?”
The ash-gray eyes, which for some years now had been sheltered behind shell-rimmed spectacles, turned their gentle, defenseless gaze upon Eve.
“Yes, I’m going there after a bit. But first I’ve got the Academy of Medicine. And since the meeting is only at three o’clock I think I shall have time to … Yes, I can stop by the flower market, and perhaps a minute or two in the Luxembourg Gardens.”
The klaxon of the Ford was already sounding three times in front of the house. In a few minutes Marie, wandering among the pots of flowers and baskets of slips, would be picking out the plants she wanted for the laboratory garden and depositing them with caution, well protected by newspapers, on the seat in her car.
The gardeners and flower growers knew her well—but she practically never went inside a florist’s shop. Some undefined instinct and the habits of poverty kept her away from precious flowers. Jean Perrin, the gayest and most attentive of her friends, made his irruptions into Mme Curie’s house with his arms laden with bouquets. And, as if she were admiring jewels, Marie would contemplate the big carnations and fine roses with surprise, with a little timidity.
Half-past two. The Ford dropped Marie at the gate of the Luxembourg Gardens, and the scientist hastened toward her appointment “near the lion on the left.” Among the hundreds of children who were playing in the garden on this early afternoon there was one little girl who, when she saw her, would race toward her with all the speed of tiny legs: Hélène Joliot, Irène’s child. In appearance Mme Curie was a reserved and undemonstrative grandmother, but she wasted a great deal of time and made long detours in order to spend a few minutes with this baby, dressed in bright red, who questioned her tyrannically: “Where are you going, Mé? Why don’t you stay here with me, Mé?”
The clock on the Senate building marked ten minutes to three. Marie must leave Hélène and her sand pies. At the severe meeting hall in the Rue Bonaparte Marie took her usual place next to her old friend, Dr Roux. And, the only woman among sixty venerable colleagues, she participated in the work of the Academy of Medicine.
“Ah! How tired I am!”
Nearly every evening Marie Curie, her face quite pale, worn and aged by fatigue, would murmur this phrase. She left the laboratory very late, at half-past seven or sometimes at eight o’clock. Her car brought her home, and the three stories seemed harder to climb than ever before. She put on her slippers, threw a jacket of black wool over her shoulders and wandered aimlessly through the house, made more silent by the end of the day, as she waited for the maid to announce the meal.
It would have been no use for her daughter to say: “You work too hard. A woman of sixty-five cannot and ought not to work as you do, twelve or fourteen hours a day.” Eve knew perfectly well that Mme Curie was incapable of working any less, and that working less, becoming reasonable would mean the dreadful indication of decrepitude. And the only wish that the young girl could formulate was that her mother might find the strength to work fourteen hours a day for a long time to come.
Since Irène no longer lived in the Quai de Béthune, Eve and her mother dined alone. The thousand incidents of a long day preoccupied Marie, and she could not refrain from commenting aloud on them. Evening after evening these scattered remarks traced a mysterious and moving picture of the intense activity in that laboratory to which Mme Curie belonged, body and soul. Apparatus which Eve was never to see became familiar to her—familiar like those collaborators of whom Marie spoke warmly, almost tenderly, with the aid of many possessive adjectives:
“I am really very well pleased with ‘my’ young Grégoire. I knew he was very gifted!…” (Then, having finished her soup:) “Just think, today I went to see ‘my’ Chinese, in the Salle de Physique. We talk in English, and our conversations last forever: in China it is impolite to contradict anybody, and when I state a hypothesis which this young man has just proved wrong by experiment, he continues to agree courteously. I have to guess when he has an objection to make! In front of these students from the Far East I am always ashamed of my bad manners. They are so much more civilized than we are!” (Taking some compote:) “Ah, Evette, one of these evenings we must invite ‘my’ Pole, this year’s Pole. I am afraid he must be very lost in Paris.…”
Workers of many nationalities succeeded each other in the Tower of Babel that was the Radium Institute. There was always a Pole among them. When Mme Curie could not bestow a university scholarship on one of her compatriots without injustice to some better qualified candidate, she paid the expenses of the young man from Warsaw out of her own money—a generosity which the young man never knew.
Suddenly Marie interrupted herself, threw off the obsession of the laboratory, leaned toward her daughter and said in another voice:
“Now, darling … tell me something. Give me some news of the world!”
One could tell her anything, even—and above all—childish things. Eve’s satisfied remarks upon the “forty-five-miles-an-hour average” that she got out of her car found the most understanding listener in Marie. Mme Curie, a prudent but ardent motorist, observed the sporting performances of her own Ford with emotion. Stories about her granddaughter Hélène, a quotation from the child’s talk, could make her suddenly laugh to the point of tears, with an unexpected laugh of youth.
She also knew how to talk politics without bitterness. Ah! her comforting liberalism!… If Frenchmen praised dictatorships in front of her, she answered gently: “I have lived under a regime of oppression. You have not. You don’t understand your own good fortune in living in a free country.…” The partisans of revolutionary violence met with the same resistance: “You can never convince me that it was useful to guillotine Lavoisier.”
But she retained the audacity and vehemence of a young Polish “progressive.” That France should be lacking in hospitals and schools, that thousands of families lived in unhealthy lodgings, that the rights of women should be precarious—all these were thoughts that tortured her.
A GROUP PHOTOGRAPH MADE AT THE INSTITUTE OF RADIUM IN PARIS
In the Front Row Are Irène Curie, Marie Curie, and Their co-worker, Andrè Debierne. (Illustration Credit 25.1)
MME CURIE AND HER DAUGHTER IRÈNE, 1925 (Illustration Credit 25.2)
Marie had never had time to be a perfect educator to her daughters. But Irène and Eve received one gift from her that they will never be able to appreciate enough: the incomparable benefit of living near an exceptional being—exceptional not only in her genius, but by her humanity, by her innate refusal of all vulgarity and littleness. Mme Curie avoided even that element of vanity that might most easily have been forgiven her: to let herself be cited as an example to other women. “It isn’t necessary to lead such an antinatural existence as mine,” she sometimes said to calm her overmilitant admirers. “I have given a great deal of time to science because I wanted to, because I loved research.… What I want for women and young girls is a simple family life and some work that will interest them.”
During these calm evening meals it sometimes happened that Mme Curie and Eve talked of love. This woman, tragically and unjustly maltreated, had no great esteem for the passion. She would willingly have adopted the formula of one eminent French writer: “Love is not an honorable sentiment.”
I think [she once wrote to Eve] that we must seek for spiritual strength in an idealism which, without making us prideful, would oblige us to place our aspirations and our dreams very high—and I also think it is a source of disappointment to make all the interest of one’s life depend upon sentiments as stormy as love.…
She knew how to receive all sorts of confidences and to keep their secret so delicately and totally that it seemed as if she had never heard them. She also knew how to hurry to the rescue of her own when they were threatened by danger or unhappiness. But, with her, conversations on love were never real exchanges. Her judgments and her philosophy remained obstinately impersonal, and never, under any circumstances, did Marie open the gates of her sorrowful past to take lessons or memories from its store. That was an intimate realm into which nobody, however near to her heart, had the right to venture.
She allowed her daughter to divine only one thing, her homesickness at growing old far from the two sisters and the brother to whom she had remained tenderly attached. First by exile and then by widowhood, she had been doubly deprived of the family warmth which was sweet to her. She wrote sad letters to the friends she regretted seeing so rarely—to Jacques Curie, living at Montpellier, to Joseph and to Hela, and to Bronya, whose life had been devastated like her own: Bronya had lost her two children and, in 1930, her husband Casimir Dluski.
Marie to Bronya, April 12, 1932:
DEAR BRONYA,
I too am sad that we are separated. But even though you do feel lonely, you have one consolation just the same: there are three of you in Warsaw, and thus you can have some company and some protection. Believe me, family solidarity is after all the only good thing. I have been deprived of it, so I know. Try to get some comfort out of it, and don’t forget your Parisian sister: let us see each other as often as possible.…
If Eve was going out after dinner Mme Curie would come into her room, lie down on the divan and watch her dress.
Their opinions upon dress and feminine esthetics were fundamentally different. But Marie had long since given up hope of imposing her principles. Of the two, it was rather Eve who oppressed her mother by an imperious insistence on renewing her black dresses before they were worn to rags. The discussions of the two women therefore remained academic, and it was with resignation, or even with gaiety and humor, that the mother made her comments to the daughter.
“Oh, my poor darling! What dreadful heels! No, you’ll never make me believe that women were made to walk on stilts.… And what sort of new style is this, to have the back of the dress cut out? Décolletage in front was bearable, just; but these miles and miles of naked back! First of all, it’s indecent; secondly, it makes you run the risk of pleurisy; thirdly, it is ugly: the third argument ought to touch you if the others don’t.… However, apart from all this, your dress is pretty. But you wear black too much. Black isn’t suited to your age.…”
The most painful moments were those of the make-up box. After a prolonged effort toward what she judged to be a perfect result, Eve would answer her mother’s ironic appeal: “Turn round a little so that I can admire you!” Mme Curie would examine her fairly, scientifically, and in the end with consternation.
“Well, of course, I have no objection in principle to all this daubing and smearing. I know it has always been done. In ancient Egypt the women invented far worse things.… I can only tell you one thing: I think it’s dreadful. You torture your eyebrows, you daub at your lips without the slightest useful purpose.…”
“But, Mé, I assure you it’s better like this!”
“Better!!! Listen here; to console myself I’m coming tomorrow morning to kiss you in your bed, before you’ve had time to put those horrors on your face. I like you when you’re not so tricked out.… And now you must run, my dear child. Good night.… Ah! by the way, you haven’t anything you can give me to read?”
“Of course. What would you like?”
“I don’t know … something that won’t depress me. One has to be young like you to endure all these painful and distressing novels.”
She never reread the Russians, even Dostoievsky whom she had once adored. Eve and she, in spite of differing literary tastes, had certain favorites in common: Kipling, Colette … Marie Curie was never tired of looking through the Jungle Book, the Naissance du Jour,† Sido† or Kim for the magnificent living reflections of that nature which was always her comfort, her element. And she knew by heart thousands of verses—in French, German, Russian, English or Polish.…
Holding the volume Eve had chosen for her, she would take refuge in her study, stretch out on the chaise longue covered with red velvet, place a swansdown cushion under her head, and turn a few pages.
But at the end of half an hour, perhaps an hour, she put the book down. She rose, seized a pencil, notebooks, scientific manuals: she would work now, as was her habit, until two or three o’clock in the morning.
When Eve came in she would see the light in her mother’s study through the round window on a narrow corridor; she crossed the corridor and pushed at the door.…
The spectacle was the same every night. Mme Curie, surrounded by papers, calculating rulers, and monographs, was seated on the floor. She had never been able to get used to working in front of a desk, installed in an armchair according to the tradition of “thinkers.” She had to have limitless space to spread out her documents and her sheets of graphs.
She was absorbed in a difficult theoretical calculation, and although she had noticed her daughter’s return, she did not lift her head. Her brows frowned and her face was preoccupied.
A notebook was on her knees. She scribbled signs and formulæ on it. From her lips escaped a murmur.
Mme Curie was pronouncing figures and numbers in an undertone. And like the little girl of sixty years ago in the arithmetic class at Mlle Sikorska’s school, this professor at the Sorbonne was counting in Polish.…