Evening star. [volume], August 23, 1936, Page 7, Image 77

About Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
A winner of the Nobel Prize in science —
I like her mother, who discovered radium.
One of the first three women ever named to a
French Cabinet. What is Irene Joliot-Curie
\ really like, behind the scenes?
* Her sister answers in this intimate sketch
J, by Eve Curie
■PHE daughter of two great scholars, the
1 wife of a scholar and a scholar herself —
1 that is my sister, Irene Joliot-Curie.
1 A very strong personality has allowed
| her to accomplish tl)is miracle: to be unlike
j anyone, to imitate no one —not even her
illustrious mother, in whose wake she seems,
y by her Nobel Prize discoveries, to follow.
I I would not have imagined that two people
1 could follow, in such different ways, the
it strange destiny which leads a girl from the
I Sorbonne to the retorts of a laboratory, makes
■ her marry a fellow student and, with him,
I conquer glory. I once thought that our mother
■ had the secret and had taken it with her. To
■ my mind, a great scholar had to have the
n inner radiance of Marie Curie, her enthusi
U as tic stubbornness, her secret grace.
I But another woman, Irene Joliot-Curie, has
I followed, step by step, the same exceptional
I'career. She is a quite different woman, one
I whose character and reactions have always
J been a puzzle to me.
When I was a child, my elder sister’s be
havior filled me with wonder and seemed
scandalous to me.
I used to watch with great consternation
whenever Irene Curie received a box of sweets.
She would put it in her small yellow pine
wood cupboard, always meticulously tidy,
take it out once a day to eat one piece — and
only one — and finally forget even the exist
ence of this treasure which I would have
gulped down in a few hours.
I saw her accumulate in a savings box,
franc by franc, sums which seemed enormous
to me and which she never spent simply be
cause she never wanted anything.
I saw her arrive every day in school, always
on time, her homework scrupulously done in a
funny childlike handwriting, her lessons fruit
lessly learned. This young, shy, difficult-to
make-friends-with person had not the dash
and spirit of other brilliant pupils. She had
something better: in her well organized brain
knowledge remained forever solidly fixed. And
when examination days came — those days
which even our mother used to spend in a
state of feverish excitement — they held
nothing unusual for Irene Curie. She calmly
started on her way to the Sorbonne, came
back with the certainty of having passed —
then awaited, wholly unmoved, the announce
ment of a result that she had known before
hand.
Balance... marvelous balance. This young
woman does not know — at least, I do
not think she knows — what torment
ing thoughts, discouragement or
pessimism are. She possesses the
art of evading anxiety whic
might interfere with the
Aom Photot
MULE. EVE CURIE. THE AUTHOR
course of her life. And although she is not in
the least vain, she never doubts herself. She
always knew what she wanted, and accom
plished it without haste or vain display, but
with patient courage.
Above all, she loves scientific research. In
1921 she published, in the“Comptes Rendus,"
her first essay as a physicist. In 1935, after
fourteen years of hard work, the Nobel Prize
for Chemistry brought her celebrity and com
pensation for having, with her husband, made
a notable .contribution to the progress of
science.
Because she hates town life, its dust and
noise, she had a small house built in the
suburbs of Paris and another in Brittany. In
this way, from one end of the year to the
other, she can combine her work with the
healthy home life that she likes.
She adores sports and even in periods of
the greatest intellectual strain she manages
to find time for swimming, skiing, canoeing
and mountain climbing.
But no human force could drive Irene Curie
to do what she does not like: pay some at
tention to her dresses, see irksome people —
or not yawn at an official reception.
Her invulnerable calm and constant good
mood have often helped those who were near
her: soldiers wounded in the war, whom she
has looked after for years; our mother, whose
Photo by Ewing Galloway
BOTH GENIUSES: THE LATE •
MADAME CURIE AND IRENE
constant fellow worker she had been for so
long; the students in the laboratory, whose
experiments she supervises or directs.
She is neither frivolous nor wavering. All
my attempts to persuade her to do her light
and fluffy hair properly, to make up her immo
bile, primitively featured face a little, have
remained unsuccessful. Neither have I ever
succeeded in putting her out of temper. I
never heard her say a wicked thing. And, to
my knowledge, she has never told a lie.
She is a relentlessly straight being who al
ways shows herself to everyone as she really
is, with her merits and her defects, without
ever seeking to set herself off or to p^a«*
Having in 1926' announced to us—our
mother and me — her engagement, Irene
Curie introduced to us Frederic Joliot, the
most brilliant, the most earnest of the stu
dents in the Radium Institute.
This married couple — a thoughtful uni
versity woman and a young and impetuous
scholar, bursting with vitality and
ideas —for ten years has been one of the
happiest I have known. Beside her husband,
whom she hardly ever leaves, since they work
together on their scientific researches, Irene
Joliot-Curie has become more human and
supple. I have watched her, little by little,
adapt herself to family life, become a good
housewife and deeply attached to the two
children she has borne.
The stem-looking physicist has now a pas
sion for social questions and even political
doctrines. And, am our opinions differ on
several points, I managed, some time ago,
to have with my “neVer-to-be-put-out-of
temper" sister an ardent controversy which
lasted at least seven minute*
Astounded, and marveling at thy unhoped
for result, we looked at each other in silence
and broke into peals of laughter. Then, chang- -
ing the subject, I asked Irene Joliot-Curie to
make clear to me the real nature of that arti
ficial radium the discovery of which won her
the Nobel Prqie. ...
A HAPPY FAMILY: THE JOLIOT-CURIES AND THEIR CHILDREN