Evening star. [volume], November 01, 1959, Page 28, Image 160

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

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
The Love Stout That Chanced Oub Wobld Continued from page 26
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Oh thm road: Pierre and Marie on a rare vacation —a bicycle jaunt in 1896
who struggled against adversity and became a
triumphant success. The story of Marie Curie
lies precisely in the fact that she was happiest
during her stuggles and least happy when the
world acclaimed her. Hers is a success story with
an ironic twist. Einstein said, "Marie Curie is,
of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame
has not corrupted." "She did not know how to
be famous," says Eve Curie. In one deliberate
sentence of her introduction, she strikes to the
heart of the secret:
"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 human being that could
give all and take nothing, could even receive noth
ing; and above all the quality of a soul in which
neither fame nor adversity could change the
exceptional purity.”
Recall that unbelievably dramatic life.
She is born Manya Sklodowska, youngest child of
a Warsaw physicist and a sensitive, tubercular
mother. The childhood is unhappy, torn by the
death of mother and eldest sister, rendered over
serious by poverty, given a certain tenseness by
the fact that she is a member of a subject race, the
Poles. She grows up, becomes the conventional
intellectual rebel of her time, like "all the little
Polish girls who had gone mad for culture." She
is intelligent, but nothing yet reveals that "im
movable structure” of which her daughter speaks.
She becomes a governess, a bit of a bluestocking
28
Marie Curies w An unbelievably dramatic life”
touched with Tolstoyan sentimentality. Now "the
eternal student” begins to rise up in her. The little
child who at five stood in rapt awe before her
father’s case containing the "phys-ics ap-pa-ra-tus”
reawakens in the girl of 18. Her duties as a gover
ness do not prevent her from studying. She has
no money, not even for stamps so that she may
write to her brother.
But "I am learning chemistry from a
book." Back in Warsaw, she is allowed to perform
elementary chemical experiments in a real labora
tory, and at last, after inconceivable setbacks and
economies, after years of weary waiting, she goes
to Paris to study at the Sorbonne.
On 40 rubles a month Manya (now Marie)
Sklodowska lives, studies, learns. Solitude, near
starvation, an unheated garret none of these
things matters, as long as at least a part of her day
is spent in the laboratory. Now even the miser
able 40 rubles cease. She is about to return in
despair to Warsaw when she is given a 600-rubel
scholarship. A few years afterward, with the first
money she earns as a scientist, she returns the
amount of the scholarship so that some other poor
student may be assisted by it.
In 1894 she meets Pierre Curie, already a physic
ist of note, a mind "both powerful and noble.” In
an atmosphere of garrets and laboratories, these
two, very grave and serious, conduct their love af
fair. They marry. On her wedding day, to the
generous friend who wishes to give her a bridal
dress, she writes "I have no dress except the one I
wear every day. If you are going to be kind enough
to give me one, please let it be practical and dark
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85
Homo: She was happier in the laboratory than in the limelight
so that I can put it on afterwards to go to the
laboratory.”
It is a perfect marriage, the marriage not merely
of two people who love each other but, what is in
comparably more interesting and important, of
two great physicists who can help each other. It
is Marie, attracted by the uranium researches of
Henri Becquerel, who starts herself and her hus
band on the long, tedious, glorious path at the end
of which lies radium.
They know that radium and polonium (named
by Marie to commemorate her beloved native land)
exist, but they must prove it. From 1898 to 1902,
in a dilapidated, leaking, freezing shed, with
primitive apparatus, with little or no help, un
aided by the scientific bureaucracy or by the State,
these two gentle fanatics work in an absorption
that is like a dream. The government is too busy
spending money on armament to buy them the
few tons of pitchblende they need. Somehow they
get their pitchblende, paying for its transportation
themselves out of their insufficient salaries.
With "her terrible patience," Marie, doing the
work of four strong men, pounds away at her
chemical masses. Somewhere in this inert brown
stuff lies radium. Marie loses 15 pounds during
these five years. At last they isolate the element.
All this time they have been bringing
up a family. The family includes two daughters
destined for fame second only to their parents’
writer Eve and scientist Irene. They have had
sorrows, family illnesses. Pierre’s mother has
died of the very disease against which radium is
soon to prove Continued on page 31
THIS WEEK Magazine / Novambar 1, lfsf