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LIFE OF MADAME CURIE
BY
EVE CURIE
TRANSLATED
BY
VINCENT SHEEAN
CHAPTER IX Forty Roubles a Month
CHAPTER XII The Discovery of Radium
CHAPTER XIII Four Years in a Shed
CHAPTER XX Successes and Ordeals
CHAPTER XXII Peace—Holidays at Larcouest
CHARPER XXV On the Île Saint-Louis
CHAPTER XXVII The End of the Mission
THE LIFE OF MARIE CURIE contains prodigies in such number that one would
like to tell her story like a legend.
She was a woman; she belonged to an oppressed nation; she was poor; she
was beautiful. A powerful vocation summoned her from her motherland, Poland, to
study in Paris, where she lived through years of poverty and solitude. There
she met a man whose genius was akin to hers. She married him; their happiness
was unique. By the most desperate and arid effort they discovered a magic
element, radium. This discovery not only gave birth to a new science and a new
philosophy: it provided mankind with the means of treating a dreadful disease.
At the moment when the fame of the two scientists and benefactors was
spreading through the world, grief overtook Marie: her husband, her wonderful
companion, was taken from her by death in an instant. But in spite of distress
and physical illness, she continued alone the work that had been begun with him
and brilliantly developed the science they had created together.
The rest of her life resolves itself into a kind of perpetual giving. To
the war wounded she gave her devotion and her health. Later on she gave her
advice, her wisdom and all the hours of her time to her pupils, to future
scientists who came to her from all parts of the world.
When her mission was accomplished she died exhausted, having refused
wealth and endured her honors with indifference.
It would have been a crime to add the slightest ornament to this story,
so like a myth. I have not related a single anecdote of which I am not sure. I
have not deformed a single essential phrase or so much as invented the colour
of a dress. The facts are as stated; the quoted word were actually pronounced.
I am indebted to my Polish family, charming and cultivated, and above
all to my mother)s eldest sister, Mme Dluska, who was her dearest friend, for
precious letters and direct evidence on the youth of the scientist. From the
personal papers and short biographical notes left by Marie Curie, from
innumerable official documents, the narratives and letters of French and Polish
friends whom I cannot thank enough, and from the recollections of my sister
Irene Joliot-Curie, of my brother-in-law, Frederic Joliot and my own, I have
been able to evoke her more recent years.
I hope that the reader may constantly feel, across the ephemeral
movement of one existence, what in Marie Curie was even more rare than her work
or her life: the immovable structure of a character; the stubborn effort of an
intelligence; the free immolation of a being that could give all and take
nothing, could even receive nothing; and above all the quality of a soul in
which neither fame nor adversity could change the exceptional purity.
Because she had that soul, without the slightest sacrifice Marie Curie
rejected money, comfort and the thousand advantages that genuinely great men
may obtain from immense fame. She suffered from the part the world wished her
to play; her nature was so susceptible and exacting that among all the
attitudes suggested by fame she could choose none: neither familiarity nor
mechanical friendliness, deliberate austerity nor showy modesty.
She did not know how to be famous.
My mother was thirty-seven years old when I was born. When I was big
enough to know her well, she was already an ageing woman who had passed the
summit of renown. And yet it is the celebrated scientist who is strangest to
me—probably because the idea that she was a “celebrated scientist” did not
occupy the mind of Marie Curie. It seems to me, rather, that I have always
lived near the poor student, haunted by dreams, who was Marya Sklodovska long
before I came into the world.
And to this young girl Marie Curie still bore a resemblance on the day
of her death. A hard and long and dazzling career had not succeeded in making
her greater or less, in sanctifying or debasing her. She was on that last day
just as gentle, stubborn, timid and curious about all things as in the days of
her obscure beginnings.
It was impossible to inflict on her, without sacrilege, the pompous
obsequies which governments give their great men.
In a country graveyard, among summer flowers, she had the simplest and
quietest burial, as if the life just ended had been like that of a thousand
others.
I should have liked the gifts of a writer to tell of this eternal student—of
whom Einstein said: “Marie Curie is, of all celebrated beings, the only one
whom fame has not corrupted”—passing like a stranger across her own life,
intact, natural and very nearly unaware of her astonishing destiny.
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