The Streets of Paris

Marie Curie: Panthéon and Bibliotheque Sainte-Geneviève at rue Valette

LOCATIONS: 10, Place du Panthéon, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève; 11, Rue Pierre et Marie Curie, Musée Curie; 36, Quai de la Béthune, Île Saint-Louis, Marie Curie’s last residence in Paris

MÉTRO: Cluny-Sorbonne; rue Monge; Cardinal Lemoine

The only money Marie Curie (1867–1934) had with her when her train pulled into the Gare du Nord in 1891 went to pay the fees for attending science classes at the Sorbonne. With little money left for expenses, she ate almost nothing except buttered bread, tea, and chocolate over the two and a half years she lived in a series of garrets around the Latin Quarter—3, rue Flatters, 11, rue des Feuillantines, and a private house on boulevard de Port-Royal. All were sixth-floor walk-ups without heat, light, or water. In winter the water froze in the washbasin. She slept in her clothes; her blanket the black woolen coat she’d brought from Poland. She was twenty-four years old. Alone. Hungry. Passionately determined.

A brilliant teenaged student in Warsaw who won all the first prizes, she was locked out of the university not only because she was a woman. Poland was occupied by Russia; the tsar controlled every aspect of Polish life, outlawing the use of the Polish language in schools and homes, sentencing dissidents to Siberia. There was no future in Poland for the likes of Manya Sklodowska as she was called then. To keep her spirit alive she held close the dream of the faraway Sorbonne. Her secret paradise. She worked for four years as a governess in a remote province, saving her money, teaching herself math, physics, chemistry, and French in the middle of the night and at dawn before her job of caring for four children began, finally saving enough to pay for the train ticket out.

As a student living in the Latin Quarter, Marie Sklodowska—she changed the Polish “Manya” to the French “Marie”—lived on three francs a day. She did nothing but study, work in the labs of the Faculty of Science, and sleep four hours a night. A few times she fainted from fatigue and hunger, once in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Occasionally she treated herself to an egg and a walk into the country on the outskirts of Paris. She loved open green space, the world of nature.

In 1893 she passed first in the Master of Science exam in physics. The following year she came in second in the Master’s in math.

Degrees in hand, she still felt guilty about not returning to Warsaw to look after her aging father. But she was now a successful resident of paradise, a star among the students in the Sorbonne’s Faculty of Science. The leading men of French science talked to her about her work, made her welcome in their labs. The high intellectual energy of the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne in particular, had proved true to its reputation: it had captured her soul, her dream became real. This new world she lived in intensified her determination to succeed as a scientist, to do something extraordinary. More and more, her work in the library and the labs intoxicated her.

When a professor assigned her a study that required a workroom larger than the small lab where she was working, a friend introduced her to a physicist/director of the School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry of the City of Paris (EPCI) in rue Lhomond who had some extra work space.

Pierre Curie, born in 1859 in Paris, was another genius, his discoveries known all over Europe. In France, though, because he had not attended any of the prestigious écoles, he received little attention. At first he and the strange Polish woman talked only science. She told him that when her studies ended and she had her teaching certificate in hand, she planned to return to Poland to care for her father.

But on their first meeting both of them realized the immediate sympathy they felt for each other. That they shared an absolute devotion to science intensified that bond. In summer 1895, they married. Their “wedding tramp” was a bicycle trip in Brittany and the Auvergne. By the time they came home to Paris in October, they were deeply devoted to one another. She loved his peaceful eyes, serene, deep. He never raised his voice. Their first child, Irène, born in 1897, would one day win a Nobel Prize herself.

Pierre found a small workspace for Marie at the EPCI where their professional collaboration became the pattern of their life together for the next almost nine years. (EPCI has been relocated to rue Pierre-Brossolette, named for a great leader of the French Resistance—see here.) Marie notes in her autobiography that the couple’s work that began at the end of 1897—in “a miserable old shed” of a lab—culminated in their achievement of the “great work of our lives.” Her choice of topic for her doctoral studies produced that achievement: She would study the radiation of uranium, in the process discovering other substances hidden in it, polonium—named for her native Poland—and thorium. They were also radioactive substances.

They emitted rays which she and Pierre saw as signs of the hidden wonders and miracles alive in the invisible universe of science. In time she realized that the rays signified an atomic property. For years she sifted and analyzed and purified pitchblende, an ore of uranium, four times more radioactive than pure uranium, trying to discover other elements. Husband and wife invented their methods of research, so ingenious and difficult and wild from both a nonscientist and a scientist’s point of view. “I sometimes passed the whole day stirring a mass (of pitchblende) in ebullition, with an iron rod nearly as big as myself. At night I was broken with fatigue.” And yet, she wrote, in this old shed they spent the best and happiest years of their life.

She took breaks from the backbreaking work, bicycling home to rue de la Glacière to nurse the baby, check on the nanny who took Irène to Parc Montsouris, put on the dinner, cook up fruits, make jam, and note in her journal when Irène spoke, smiled, shook hands, laughed, walked for the first time. Biking back to the shed, sometimes in the middle of the night, she loved to walk in and see the luminous rays emitted in the dark from the tubes in their lab. And yet in Poland, where there is national pride in her scientific achievements, she is often described as a “bad mother.” She worked so many long hours outside the home. She didn’t smile, or cuddle her daughters for photographers. She had a freakish, unfeminine love of math and science. Her second child, Eve Curie, a professional musician, wrote a biography of her mother, Madame Curie (1937), still in print, that is heart-stopping in its affection as well as its understanding of the woman and her science.

The discovery of radium made the Curies famous. But it took four years to produce the kind of evidence which chemical science demands: that radium is truly a new element. In 1902 they were able to establish the existence and character of radium. Their study became the basis of the new science of radioactivity. They wanted no patent, no material profit. Radium should be of use in treating disease. At last the Sorbonne came through with a chair in Physics for Pierre.

In June 1903 Marie defended her doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne, becoming the first woman in France to receive the doctorate. Still the Sorbonne provided no lab for the Curies’ work, no job for Marie. The Curies, after all, were nobodies, one of them an immigrant, the other “home-schooled” because his father knew his son’s originality would be destroyed in the rigid French schoolrooms. To the men who delivered the truckloads of pitchblende (donated by Austria) to the miserable shed in rue Lhomond, they were that pair of “French lunatics.”

When the Nobel committee wrote to Pierre Curie in November 1903 that for his discovery of radium he would receive the Nobel Prize for Physics, Pierre declined the award: He insisted that the committee add the name of his wife Marie Curie to the citation. In December they were jointly awarded the prize for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements. Marie never seemed irritated by the gender bias of various institutions, the universities, the Swedish academicians, the family. Although she was responsible for childcare, meals, sewing baby clothes, what sustained her was the opposite of resentment: her gratitude for the freedom to do science, to work as an equal with the man she loved. Did she even realize that she belonged to “the weaker sex,” in France as in Poland? Or, as biographer Barbara Goldsmith tells it, that at the turn of the century, wealthy Parisians saw commitment to an insane asylum the solution to the problem of a wife with a mind of her own?

The Curies despised the publicity machine that went into overdrive after they’d won the Nobel Prize. Pierre had always hated competition, hierarchies, classifications. And yet, looking back after April 19, 1906, none of the noise and fuss mattered. On that dark rainy day in Paris, absentminded Pierre was knocked over by a horse and cart coming off the Pont Neuf, dragged by the horse into rue Dauphine. His skull was broken in pieces, his brains left on the cobblestones. Marie’s grief and depression almost finished her as a scientist. “A cope of solitude and secrecy fell upon her shoulders forever,” writes her daughter. She became icy, lifeless, an automaton, “cold as a herring,” in the words of Albert Einstein, a friend, colleague, and hiking companion.

For the Traveler

At night, after a long day of classes, the pale thin ash-blonde student from Poland found refuge and delight in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève on Place du Panthéon where the gas was lit, it was warm, and she could study at one of the long tables until the closing bell rang at midnight. Besides the warmth, she loved the silence and the atmosphere of concentration. Heading back to her garret, she could ignore the drunken students roaming the streets of the Latin Quarter, the loud nightlife of the many student cafés (now gone). Since the time of François Villon the Quarter had belonged to the young.

After the solitary hours in the library, she walked home as if detached from the material world, possessed by the mysteries of physics and chemistry. Her love of science and her desire to study were the forces that had moved her to abandon Poland and her family and risk a new life in the City of Light. As Luther had said centuries before, “It is in Paris that we find the most celebrated and most excellent of schools: it is called the Sorbonne.”

The walk from the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève to the streets where she lived takes about twenty minutes if you follow rue Saint-Jacques past rue Pierre et Marie Curie to your left, then crossing rue Gay-Lussac and bearing left into the nondescript rue des Feuillantines. The half-starving Polish girl might have thought her mind had collapsed had anyone prophesized in 1892 that a street in the ancient quarter of the great schools would one day be named after her.

To visit the second-floor reading room of the Bibliothèque present your passport to someone sitting behind a table to the left in the first-floor entrance hall. He/she will accompany you up a long stairway and through a wide doorway into the vast Labrouste Reading Room. Here you see students and visitors sitting at long rectangular tables with small green lamps under a magnificent curved iron and glass roof, a sort of shapely, beautifully designed skylight. The reading room’s calm brings to mind a monastic setting filled with light. In fact, the library occupies the site of the library of the Abbaye Sainte-Geneviève where Peter Abelard starred in the twelfth century (see here).

The building (built 1844–1850, see www-bsg.univ-paris1.fr/), one of the masterpieces of architect Henri Labrouste, is an early example of a metal-framed building made out of wrought and cast iron. It holds some 150,000 volumes from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, including original manuscripts of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Gide, and Valéry. In the stillness of the reading room, you might feel the presence of scholars’ past, the wisdom of great literature, the joy of Manya Sklodowska: “All that I saw and learned was a new delight to me … the world of science which I was at last permitted to study and know in all liberty.”

The library’s exterior façade, resembling a Renaissance palace, is covered with the incised names of great men who have shaped the mind of Europe and Asia: Abelard’s appears directly above the front door, next to Suger, and then Mahomet, Petrarch, Dante, Marco Polo, Chaucer, Bruno, Spinoza, Cervantes, Rabelais, Luther, Calvin, Vico to name only a very few. No women made the cut. Place du Panthéon, which the library faces is a wide open generous space, sometimes crowded with students lining up to enter the library as well as tourists headed for the Panthéon. Again, Manya Sklodowska might have feared she suffered from the hallucinatory effects of malnutrition had she heard or felt any intimation that she would one day be buried inside the great temple of French heroes.

Five minutes away from the Bibliothèque, bearing right around the corner of rue Soufflot and downhill onto rue Saint-Jacques, you can enter the courtyard of the Sorbonne. (Sometimes you’ll be asked to show a photo ID.) Marie Curie heard the results of her exams of 1893 and 1894 in the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne. (To book a tour of “this most excellent of schools,” visit www.sorbonne.fr/en/the-sorbonne/visiting. Tel: 01.40.46.23.48 or go to visites.sorbonne@ac-paris-fr. The tour is well worth the two hours and 9 euros you’ll spend.)

After Pierre’s death, the Sorbonne hired his widow to take over Pierre’s physic classes. A statue of Professor Marie Curie sits high in the Sorbonne’s Salle des Autorités in the Faculty of Science. She looks like a young girl.

The Musée Curie (www.musee.curie.fr), a ten-minute walk from the Sorbonne, is the best place in Paris to get a clear sense of the scientific genius and moral seriousness of the Curies. You’ll find it at 11, rue Pierre et Marie Curie off rue Saint-Jacques. (Hours: Weds–Sat, 1–5. Métro: rue Monge; Cardinal Lemoine.)

Exhibits include extensive neon timelines showing important events in the developing study of radioactivity, the contributions made by Pierre, Marie, and their daughter Irène and her husband Frédéric Joliot, both of whom won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935. The original Institute of Radium, funded by the Sorbonne, and the Pasteur Institute, comprised two parts: a lab of radioactivity in the front building, directed by Marie Curie, and behind it, across the garden, a lab for biological research into the treatment of cancer, directed by an eminent physician: the two institutes worked in cooperation for the development of the science of radium.

The lovely garden between the two buildings, which Marie designed and planted herself, still provides a spot of calm and a place to sit. You’ll find the entrance through the excellent small museum bookshop and out the rear exit from her research pavilion. At an angle, near the rue Saint-Jacques side of the building, an expressive sculpture of Marie and Pierre shows their almost mystical seriousness. Before the foundations of the buildings had been laid, Marie planted lime trees and plane trees as well as the rambler roses that are so fragrant in June and still thriving in early November. Above the garden, you see the large second-story windows of her lab which flooded her research halls with sunlight.

But before she and her staff could move into the new labs and research rooms, World War I began.

Marie stayed in Paris but all work stopped in the lab. “Even though she had been excoriated,” as Barbara Goldsmith writes, referring to Curie’s imputed love affair with the married-with-children physicist Paul Langevin and the hate attacks of the right-wing press in 1911, who, while Marie was away from Paris collecting her second Nobel Prize, stoned and graffitied her house in Sceaux—Jew, foreigner, whore, go back to Poland—Marie Curie “resolved to put all my strength at the service of my adopted country.”

Commandeering X-ray equipment from labs and doctors’ offices, she designed “mobile X-ray units” to use in war-zone hospitals to diagnose the maimed and wounded on the battlefield so they could be treated immediately. Wealthy Parisian women donated their cars. Marie and her women volunteers, though bureaucrats had at first forbidden them to drive to the front, drove to the field hospitals, where Marie and her technicians X-rayed the wounded, found the location of their bullets and the shrapnel in their bodies, directing the surgeons where to operate, little time wasted. Her chief assistant was Irène, her seventeen-year-old daughter, who often ran things on her own. Sometimes working through the night, both mother and daughter were exposed to heavy doses of X-rays and radon gas.

The last time Marie Curie visited her lab, in May 1934, she walked out the rear door and noticed that some of the roses looked unhealthy. Because she had a fever and was close to the end of her life, she couldn’t attend to the flowers herself. Her last request to a staff member was to ask the gardener to take care of the roses.

It took two more months before her undiagnosed pernicious anemia finally killed her. For a lifetime she had worked unprotected from radium, her bones and organs gradually destroyed by the effects of radiation.

There has always been the question: How did she and Pierre not know how dangerous their discovery could be to the human body? She did admit that sometimes in the lab she felt a “discomfort.” And in a letter to her sister, complaining of her failing eyesight, she wrote, “Perhaps radium has something to do with these troubles, but it cannot be affirmed with certainty.” Doctors called it a miracle that she lived to the age of sixty-seven. After the war, she made exhausting fund-raising trips to the United States, worked long hours in her lab to the end, and spared little time to enjoy the view from her apartment at 36, Quai de Béthune on the south side of the Île Saint-Louis.

There’s a way in which a part of her was always a child, curious, simple in her likes, ignoring what she didn’t understand, ignoring danger, and hunger, and the freezing temperatures in her Latin Quarter garrets. She was obsessive about her radium, which she referred to as “my child.” Albert Einstein wrote of her, “Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.”

In 1995 Marie and Pierre’s remains were transferred from the simple country cemetery where they’d been buried to the august Panthéon, France’s temple of heroes. She was the first woman to be admitted to the Panthéon on her own merits, not because she was a great man’s wife. In her lifetime her achievements had often been ignored or belittled in academe.

In her own words, she expressed her credo, the source of her tendency to ignore malice:

I am among those who think that science has great beauty. A scientist in his lab is not only a technician, he is also a child placed before natural phenomena, which impress him like a fairy tale …

Nearby

PLACE DE L’ESTRAPADE A quiet small square to the right off rue d’Ulm as you walk south, with a café and pâtisserie. It has the feel of a secret place: It began in 1515 as a site of torture and execution of Calvinists.

RUE LHOMOND Bear left off rue d’Ulm. The original building (shed) where Marie Curie worked sometimes through the night stirring pitchblende is gone, replaced by a newer science lab.

IRISH CULTURAL CENTER Open Tues–Sat, 2–6; Weds until 8; Sun 12:30–2:30. Turn left off rue Lhomond; on the right at 5, rue des Irlandais (Métro: Place Monge). www.centreculturelirlandais.com. A long garden, with tables, chairs, a few students from the surrounding college buildings where foreign students study French in summer. A good eighteenth-century library above Saint Patrick’s chapel, another library open to the public to the right of the entrance. Spring and summer, evening theater, and poetry readings in the garden.