IS MME CURIE THERE?”
“I am looking for Mme Curie. Has she come?’
“Have you seen Mme Curie?”
Young men, young women, persons in white under laboratory blouses, questioned each other in the vestibule by which the scientist had to pass when she arrived at the Radium Institute.
Five, ten or a dozen workers would gather in this way every morning to wait for her. Each one wanted—“without disturbing her”—to ask advice, to reap a little encouragement or a suggestion in passing. Thus was constituted what Marie laughingly called “the Soviet.”
The Soviet had not long to wait. At nine o’clock the old car passed the gate in the Rue Pierre Curie and turned into the alley. The iron door clanged; Mme Curie appeared by the garden entrance. The group of soliciting students collected happily about her. Respectful, timid voices announced that such-and-such a measurement had just been completed, or gave news of the polonium solution, or insinuated that “if Mme Curie could come and look at the Wilson apparatus for a moment she would see interesting results.”
Even though she sometimes complained of it, Marie adored the commotion of energy and curiosity that welcomed her from the beginning of the day. Far from attempting to slip away toward her own work, she would stay there, in coat and hat, standing in the middle of her collaborators. Each of the eager faces that met her glance recalled to her an experiment upon which she had reflected in solitude.
“M. Fournier, I have thought about what you told me. Your idea is good, but the procedure you suggest isn’t practicable. I have found another that ought to succeed. I shall come and talk to you about it. Mme Cotelle, what number did you get? Are you quite sure that the calculation was exact? Last night I did it over and I obtained a slightly different answer. However, we shall see.…”
There was no disorder and no approximation in these remarks. During the minutes she devoted to a research worker, Marie Curie was entirely concentrated upon the problem he was studying, a problem which she knew in its slightest details. An instant later she was speaking of other work with another pupil. Her brain was marvelously gifted for this singular form of gymnastics. In the laboratory, where so many young intelligences labored with determination, she resembled those chess champions who can follow thirty or forty games at a time without even looking at the pieces.
Men passed, saluted and stopped. The Soviet grew larger. Marie would end by seating herself on one of the steps of the staircase without interrupting this somewhat unorthodox consultation. Thus seated, looking up at the workers who stood round her or leaned against the wall, she did not have the classic attitude of a chief. And yet—–!
It was she who had chosen the students of the laboratory after a minute examination of their capacities. It was she, almost always, who designated their work. It was to her that pupils in distress would come, with the certainty that Mme Curie would find the experimental error that had put them on the wrong road.
In forty years of scientific labor this white-haired scientist had amassed an immense amount of knowledge. She was the living library of radium; she had read, in the five languages of which she was a master, all the publications connected with the experiments undertaken at the institute. She discovered new developments of known phenomena, invented new techniques. And, finally—of inestimable value in disentangling the mixed skeins of knowledge and hypothesis—Marie possessed common sense. Fine-spun theories, attractive but fantastic suppositions, as exposed by certain of her disciples, encountered a rejection from her clear glance and her metallic reason. To work with this daring but prudent master was security.
Little by little the group assembled on the staircase was scattered. Those to whom Marie had given her day’s suggestions made off with their loot. Mme Curie would accompany one of them as far as the “physics hall” or the “chemistry hall” and continue the conversation in front of an apparatus.… At last, set free, she would go into her own laboratory, put on her big black working blouse, and become absorbed in her personal work.
Her solitude was short. Somebody knocked at the door. One of the research workers reappeared, with sheets of manuscript in his hand. Behind him another was waiting.… On this Monday, the day of the weekly meeting at the Academy of Sciences, the authors of the communications that were to be presented that afternoon came to submit their reports to Mme Curie.
To read these papers Marie went into a very light, narrow, ordinary room, in which a stranger would have had difficulty recognizing the study of an illustrious scientist. An office desk of oak, a file, bookshelves, an old typewriter, and a leather armchair like a hundred other leather armchairs, conferred upon it a decent anonymity. On the table there were a marble inkstand, piles of brochures, a goblet stuck full of fountain pens and sharpened pencils, an “art object” offered by a students’ association, and—surprise!—a little urn from the excavations at Ischia, dull brown, ravishing.
The hands which held out the reports to the Academy to Mme Curie often trembled with emotion. Their authors knew that the examination would be severe. The writing was never clear or chaste enough to Marie’s way of thinking. She tracked down not only the technical errors; she made over whole sentences and corrected faults in syntax. “I think it might do now,” she would say to the young scientist, more dead than alive, as she handed him back his child.
But if the pupil’s work had satisfied Marie, her smile and her pleased remarks—“Very good! That’s perfect!”—compensated the physicist for his trouble and gave him wings for his journey to the laboratory of Professor Perrin. Professor Perrin customarily presented the communications of the Radium Institute to the illustrious company.
This same Jean Perrin repeated to all and sundry: “Mme Curie is not only a famous physicist: she is the greatest laboratory director I have ever known.”
What was the secret of this master? First of all, and above everything the extraordinary “chauvinism” for the Radium Institute which animated Marie. She was the perfervid servant and the natural defender of the prestige and interests of the beloved place.
She made the most determined efforts to win the stock of radioactive substances necessary to research on a large scale. Exchanges of courtesies and flirtatious compliments between Mme Curie and the directors of the Belgian radium factory, the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, invariably ended in the same way: the Union Minière would kindly send Mme Curie some tons of residue for nothing, and Marie, delighted, would immediately undertake the extraction of the coveted elements.…
From year to year she enriched her laboratory. She could be seen haunting the ministries with Jean Perrin, demanding subsidies, scholarships. Since she was “Mme Curie” the powers of the day listened to her. Thus she obtained, in 1930, an exceptional research credit of five hundred thousand francs.
Sometimes, tired and a little humiliated by the solicitations she forced herself to make, she described to Eve these waits in antechambers, these terrors, and concluded with a smile:
“I think they’ll finish by throwing us out like beggars.”
Workers in the Curie laboratory, guided by this sure pilot, explored the unexplored compartments of radioactivity one by one. From 1919 to 1934 four hundred and eighty-three scientific communications, of which thirty-four were theses, were published by the physicists and chemists of the Institute of Radium. Among these four hundred and eighty-three studies, Mme Curie had thirty-one publications to her credit.
Even though this number may seem high, it requires comment. During the last part of her life, Mme Curie was preparing the future with too much spirit of sacrifice, perhaps, and gave the greater part of her time to her role as director and teacher. What might have been her creative activity if she had been able to dedicate every one of her minutes to research, like the young men around her? And who can ever tell the part Marie took in the work she inspired and guided step by step?
She asked herself no such questions. She rejoiced over the victories won by her side and with her aid, by that collective person which she did not even call “my” laboratory, but, with an inexpressible accent of secret pride, “The Laboratory.” When she pronounced these two words no other laboratory existed on earth.
Psychological gifts, human ones, helped the solitary scientist to become a great animator and director of the work of others. Mme Curie, so devoid of familiarity, knew how to gain the devotion of working companions whom she was still calling “Mademoiselle” or “Monsieur” after years of daily collaboration.
If Marie, absorbed in some scientific discussion, sometimes stayed out on a bench in the garden for half an hour at a time, the imploring voice of an assistant would recall her to reality. “Madame, you’ll catch cold! Madame, come in, please!” Discreet hands put bread and fruit beside her when she had forgotten to go to lunch.…
The laboratory journeymen and the workmen, like the others, felt her hidden attraction, an attraction unique in the world. On the day when Marie engaged a chauffeur of her own, the factotum of the institute—Georges Boiteux, who was day laborer, mechanic, chauffeur and gardener all in one—could be seen weeping bitterly at the idea that from now on another man would drive Mme Curie from the Rue Pierre Curie to the Quai de Béthune every day.
Marie was attached, by an affection which she seldom showed, to all those who worked with her; and it enabled her to distinguish the highest and most enthusiastic spirits in this big family. I hardly ever saw my mother so overwhelmed as she was in August 1932, when she learned of the sudden death of one of her favorite pupils:
I had a great grief when I reached Paris [she wrote]. The young chemist Reymond, whom I liked so much, has been drowned in a river in Ardèche. I am quite overcome. His mother wrote to me to say that he had passed the best years of his life in the laboratory. What was the good of it, if it had to end like this? Such a fine youth, so much grace, nobility and charm, such remarkable intellectual gifts—all that wiped out because of a wretched cold bath.…
Her lucid glance discerned faults as well as qualities, and was inexorably arrested on the defects that would keep such-and-such a research worker from becoming a great scientist. Even more than vanity, she distrusted awkwardness. The material catastrophes that awkward hands brought upon the setting up of an experiment exasperated her. Of an experimenter without gifts she said one day to her intimates: “If everybody was like him there wouldn’t be many daring flights in physics!”
When one of her collaborators passed his thesis, received his diploma, or had been judged worthy of a prize, a “laboratory tea” was given in his honor. In the summer the reunion took place out-of-doors, under the lindens in the garden. In winter the noise of crockery would suddenly disturb the peace of the biggest room in the building, the library. It was an odd sort of crockery: laboratory glasses served for teacups and champagne glasses, stirring rods took the place of spoons. The girl students handed things round, offering cakes to their comrades and chiefs and to the members of the small staff. Among the groups could be seen André Debierne, who was director of lectures at the Institute of Radium, Fernand Holweck, the chief assistant, and Marie in her most animated and talkative mood, protecting her glass of tea from the movements of the crowd.
But suddenly there was a silence—Mme Curie was about to congratulate the laureate. In a few warm phrases she would praise the originality of his work and throw light upon the difficulties he had overcome. There was vigorous applause for the friendly remarks that surrounded that sort of compliment: either an amiable word for the parents of the hero of the day, or else—if he was a foreigner—for his far-off fatherland. “When you go back to your beautiful country, which I know, where your compatriots received me so kindly, I hope you will retain a pleasant memory of the Institute of Radium. You have been able to observe that we work hard here, and that we do our best.…”
Some of the “teas” had special emotional value for Marie: one of them celebrated her daughter Irène’s doctor’s thesis, another that of her son-in-law, Frédéric Joliot. Mme Curie saw the gifts of these two research workers bloom under her direction. In 1934 the young couple won a magnificent victory: after working on the phenomena of transmutation of atoms, Irène and Frédéric Joliot discovered artificial radioactivity: by bombarding certain substances (aluminium, for example) with the rays spontaneously emitted by the radioelements, they succeeded in transforming these substances into new radioactive elements unknown in nature, which henceforth would be the source of rays. The consequences of this surprising creation of atoms upon chemistry, biology and medicine can easily be seen: the time is near, perhaps, when bodies possessing the properties of radium can be manufactured industrially for the requirements of Curietherapy.
At a meeting of the Physical Society when the couple explained their work, Marie, attentive and proud, was among the public. Encountering Albert Laborde, who was formerly her assistant and Pierre Curie’s, she welcomed him with unusual exuberance: “Bonjour! They talked well, didn’t they? We’re back again in the fine days of the old laboratory.”
She was too excited and tremulous not to prolong the evening. She came home on foot, along the quays, accompanied by several colleagues. And she commented endlessly upon the success of “her young people.”
On the other side of the garden in the Rue Pierre Curie the collaborators of Professor Regaud, whom Marie familiarly called “the people across the way,” waged their war on cancer by research and therapeutics. From 1919 to 1935, 8,319 patients were taken care of at the Radium Institute.
Claude Regaud was also a laboratory patriot. He had patiently collected the arms his fight demanded: radium, apparatus, space, a hospital. In front of the enormous number of cures obtained, and the urgency of the need, he was obliged to borrow radium—the Union Minière entrusted up to ten grams to him!—and appeal to the government’s subsidies and the gifts of citizens: Baron Henri de Rothschild and Lazard Frères were his chief benefactors, as well as a magnificent but modest anonymous donor who, employing complicated precautions to preserve his incognito, presented the Curie Foundation with 3,400,000 francs.
Thus was created, little by little, the most scientific center of radiotherapy in France. Its prestige was immense: more than two hundred doctors came there from the five continents to learn the technique of cancer treatment.
Mme Curie, a physicist and chemist, took no part in the work of biology and medicine, but she followed their progress with passion. She got along admirably with Professor Regaud, a perfect colleague, high-minded and fiercely disinterested. Like Marie, he hated the noise of fame. Like her, he had always rejected material profits. By building up a practise he could have made a fortune: the notion did not even occur to him.
These two co-directors, who marveled at the excellence of treatment when it was practiced by technicians, were alike in torment over one thing: exasperated and helpless, they beheld the unscrupulous exploitation of radium throughout the world. In one place ignorant doctors would treat patients with radioactive substances in hit-or-miss fashion, without even understanding the danger of such “cures.” In another, patent medicines and even beauty products “on the basis of radium” were offered to the public—sometimes even under names similar to that of the Curies.
We need not judge such enterprises. We can simply say that my mother, the Curie family, Professor Regaud and the Institute of Radium had nothing whatever to do with them.
“See if there’s anything important.”
Marie, harassed and hurried, pointed out last night’s mail to a gentle, intelligent secretary, Mme Razet.
The envelopes frequently bore simplified addresses: “Mme Curie, Paris,” or “Mme Curie, scientist, France.” A good half of them contained requests for autographs and letters from maniacs.
A printed card answered the autograph hunters: “Mme Curie does not wish to give autographs or sign photographs and asks you to excuse her.” To the heated brains that produced many of the other letters, in which inks of different colors alternated over eight or ten pages—misunderstood inventors, persecuted madmen, madmen in love, and threatening madmen—there was only one answer possible: silence.
There remained the other letters. Marie conscientiously dictated to her secretary messages for her colleagues abroad and answers to the desperate appeals of those who imagined that Mme Curie could cure any disease or soften any suffering. There were also the letters to the manufacturers of apparatus; estimates; bills; answers to the circulars sent by her hierarchical superiors to “Mme Veuve Curie, Professor in the Faculty of Science”: an overwhelming administrative flood of paper which Marie filed methodically into forty-seven folders.
She conformed strictly to university customs. Her fame and her quality as a woman did not count in her eyes, and she naturally ended her official letters by the humble formulas of a subordinate: “deepest respect” for the dean of the faculty, and “obedient servant” to the rector of the university.
The forty-seven folders did not suffice for the relationship of Mme Curie with the external world. She was harassed by demands for interviews. On Tuesday and Friday mornings Marie put on her best black dress. “I have to be suitably dressed; it’s my day,” she would say, her face darkening and her eyebrows lowered. In the laboratory vestibule there would be petitioners waiting for her, as well as journalists, who had been frozen beforehand by Mme Razet’s warning: “Madame Curie will receive you only if you have technical information to ask her for. She does not give personal interviews.”
Even though Marie was courtesy itself, nothing encouraged the interviewer to prolong the conversation. Neither the little reception room, bare and uncomfortable, nor the hard chairs, nor the impatient flicking of the scientist’s fingers—nor Mme Curie’s sly glances toward the clock.
On Monday and Wednesday Marie was nervous and agitated from the time she got up. At five o’clock on these days she lectured. After lunch she shut herself into her study in the Quai de Béthune, she prepared the lesson, and wrote the heads of chapters of her lecture on a piece of white paper. Towards half-past four she would go to the laboratory and isolate herself again in a little rest room. She was tense, anxious, unapproachable. Marie had been teaching for twenty-five years: yet every time she had to appear in the little amphitheater before the twenty or thirty pupils who rose in unison at her entrance she unquestionably had “stage fright.”
Tireless and terrible activity! In her “idle moments” Marie composed scientific articles and books: a treatise on Isotropy and the Isotropes, a brief and touching biography of Pierre Curie, a new scientific treatise that would fix in perfect form the lectures of Mme Curie.…
These brilliant, fertile years were also the years of a dramatic struggle: Mme Curie was threatened with blindness.
The doctor told her in 1920 that a double cataract was going to bring the night upon her little by little. Marie did not allow her despair to appear. She informed her daughters of this misfortune without weakness, and immediately talked of the remedy: the operation, which could be attempted in two years, in three years.… From now to then, during the interminable waiting, thicker and thicker crystalline lenses were to put between the world and her, between her and her work, a perpetual fog.
Marie to Bronya, November 10, 1920:
My greatest troubles come from my eyes and ears. My eyes have grown much weaker, and probably very little can be done about them. As for the ears, an almost continuous humming, sometimes very intense, persecutes me. I am very worried about it: my work may be interfered with—or even become impossible. Perhaps radium has something to do with these troubles, but it cannot be affirmed with certainty.
These are my troubles. Don’t speak of them to anybody, above all things, as I don’t want the thing to be bruited about. And now let’s talk of something else.…
“Don’t speak of them to anybody.” … Such was the leitmotif of Marie’s conversations with Irène and Eve, with her brother and sisters—her only confidants. Her fixed idea was to keep the news from slipping out by indiscretion, lest a newspaper publish some fine day: “Mme Curie is an invalid.”
Her relatives and her physicians, Drs Morax and Petit, became her accomplices. Marie had taken a borrowed name: it was “Mme Carré,” an aged, unobtrusive woman, who suffered from a double cataract, and not Mme Curie. It was Mme Carré’s glasses that Eve went to get at the oculist’s.
If Marie, wandering in a fog which her glance could no longer penetrate, had to cross a street or climb a staircase, one of her daughters took her by the arm and signaled dangers and obstacles to her by an imperceptible pressure of the hand. At table it was necessary to pass objects to her, salt cellars which she was seeking by touch on the tablecloth with falsely assured gestures.
But how was this heroic and atrocious comedy to be kept up in the laboratory? Eve suggested taking her mother’s most direct collaborators into confidence so that they could manipulate microscopes and instruments of measurement for her. Marie answered drily: “Nobody needs to know that I have ruined eyes.”
For her work, so minute, she invented a “blind-man’s technique.” She used giant lenses and put colored signs, very visible, on the dials of her instruments. She wrote the notes she had to consult during lectures in enormous letters, and even in the bad light in the amphitheater she succeeded in deciphering them.
She concealed her trouble with an infinity of ruses. If a pupil was obliged to submit to Mme Curie an experimental photograph showing fine lines, Marie by hypocritical questioning, prodigiously adroit, first obtained from him the information necessary to reconstruct the aspect of the photograph mentally. Then and then alone she would take the glass plate, consider it, and appear to observe the lines.…
In spite of these precautions, of this noble duplicity, the laboratory suspected the drama. And the laboratory was silent, pretending not to understand, playing the game as cleverly as Marie.
Marie Curie to Eve, July 13, 1923:
Darling, I think I shall be operated upon Wednesday morning the eighteenth. It would be enough if you arrived here the day before. It is terribly hot and I am afraid you would be very tired.
You must tell our friends at Larcouëst that I have not been able to get through a piece of editing that we were working on together, and that I need you as I have been asked for it in a hurry.
Many kisses.
MÉ.
Tell them as little as possible, darling!
Those were torrid days at the clinic, where Eve spoon-fed the motionless, blind “Mme Carré,” with her wounded face swathed in bandages. The anxiety of unexpected complications followed: hemorrhages which destroyed all hope of cure for some weeks. Two other operations followed in March 1924, and a fourth operation in 1930. Hardly was she released from dressings before Marie began to use her abnormal eyes, amputated of their lenses, and no longer capable of focussing.
I am acquiring the habit of going about without glasses and have made some progress [she wrote to Eve from Cavalaire some months after the first operation], I took part in two walks over awkward, rocky mountain trails. That went off rather well, and I can walk fast without accidents. What bothers me most is double vision; that is what keeps me from recognizing persons as they approach. Every day I do some exercises in reading and writing. Up to now it has been more difficult than walking. Certainly you will have to help me write the article for the Encyclopædia Britannica.…
MARIE CURIE IN 1931
Three Years before Her Death. (Illustration Credit 26.1)
THE CURIE FAMILY TOMB
in the Cemetery at Sceaux. (Illustration Credit 26.2)
Little by little she triumphed over her ill fortune. Helped by thick glasses, she acquired almost normal sight, went out alone, even drove her car, and again succeeded in making delicate measurements in the laboratory. As a last miracle in a miraculous life, Marie emerged again from the shadows, and found light enough to work, to work to the end.
A little letter from Mme Curie to Bronya, dated in September 1927, contains the secret of this victory:
Sometimes my courage fails me and I think I ought to stop working, live in the country and devote myself to gardening. But I am held by a thousand bonds, and I don’t know when I shall be able to arrange things otherwise. Nor do I know whether, even by writing scientific books, I could live without the laboratory.
“I don’t know whether I could live without the laboratory.”
To understand this cry of confession we must see Marie Curie in front of her apparatus when, having finished her daily tasks, she could at last give herself over to her passion. No exceptional experiment was necessary to give this hollowed face a sublime expression of absorption and ecstasy. A difficult piece of glass-blower’s work that Marie brought off like an artist, a measurement well made, could give her the immensity of joy. An observant and sensitive collaborator, Mlle Chamié, was to describe this every-day Mme Curie, whose enraptured face was never to be caught by photography:
She sat before the apparatus, making measurements in the half darkness of an unheated room to avoid variations in temperature. The series of operations—opening the apparatus, starting the chronometer, lifting the weight, etc.—was effected by Mme Curie with admirable discipline and harmony of movement. No pianist could accomplish what Mme Curie’s hands accomplished with greater virtuosity. It was a perfect technique, which tended to reduce the coefficient of personal error to zero.
After the calculations which Mme Curie made with eagerness, to compare the results, her sincere, undisguised joy could be seen because the margins of difference were much lower than the permitted limit, which assured the precision of the measurements.
When she was at this work the rest of the world was effaced. In 1927, when Irène was seriously ill and Marie was tormented by despair, a friend came to see her in the laboratory to ask for news. He received a laconic answer and an icy look. Hardly had he left the room when Marie, indignant, said to her assistant: “Why can’t people leave one alone to work?”
Here is Mlle Chamié’s description of her, absorbed in an experiment of capital importance: the preparation of actinium X for the spectrum of alpha rays—the last work Marie accomplished before her death:
Actinium X had to be pure and in such a chemical state that it could not disengage its emanation. The working day was not long enough for the separation. Mme Curie remained at the laboratory that evening without dinner. But the separation of this element is slow: one had to pass the night at the laboratory, therefore, so that the intense source being prepared would not have time to “decrease” much.
It was two o’clock in the morning, and the last operation remained to be done: centrifugation of the liquid for an hour above a special support. The centrifuge turned with a tiresome noise, but Mme Curie remained beside it without leaving the room. She contemplated the machine as if her ardent desire to make the experiment succeed could produce the precipitation of actinium X by suggestion. Nothing existed for Mme Curie at this moment outside the centrifuge: neither her life of the morrow nor her fatigue. It was a complete depersonalization, a concentration of all her soul upon the work she was doing.…
If the experiment did not give the hoped-for result, Marie suddenly seemed thunderstruck by some unknown disaster. Seated on a chair, her arms crossed, her back humped, her gaze empty, she suggested some old peasant woman, mute and desolate in a great grief. The collaborators who saw her were vaguely afraid some accident had happened, and inquired. Marie lugubriously pronounced the words that summed up everything: “We haven’t been able to precipitate actinium X.” Or else, sometimes she openly accused the enemy, thus: “That polonium has a grudge against me.”
But success made her light and young, fluttering. She wandered cheerfully in the garden, as if she wanted to tell the rambler roses and the lindens and the sun how happy she was. She was reconciled to science, she was ready to laugh and to marvel.
When a research worker, profiting by her evident good humor, proposed to show her a current experiment, she followed him eagerly, bent over the apparatus where the “numeration” of atoms took place, and admired the sudden irradiation of a willemite ore by the action of radium.
Before these familiar miracles a supreme happiness was set alight in her ash-gray eyes. One might have said that Marie was gazing at a Botticelli or a Vermeer, the most enchanting picture in the world.
“Ah, what a pretty phenomenon!” she would murmur.