by Lydia Davis
They Take Turns Using a Word They Like
“It’s extraordinary,” says one woman.
“It is extraordinary,” says the other.
Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman
Preface
Woman of pride, passion, and labor, who was actress of her time because she had the ambition of her means and the means of her ambition, actress of ours, finally, since between Marie and atomic force, the filiation is direct.
Besides, she died of it.
Character
From birth, Marie possesses the three dispositions that make brilliant subjects, cherished by professors: memory, power of concentration, and appetite for learning.
“My heart breaks when I think of my spoiled aptitudes which, all the same, had to be worth something …”
Then what? The “ordinary destiny of women”? She never imagined making it her own.
In the Chalet of Zakopane
But in the chalet of Zakopane where she lingers, alone, in September 1891, walking her melancholy under the great black pines of the Carpathians, dragging a grippe that does not finish, one man, Casimir, could take her away. And a part of herself hopes.
In two months she will be twenty-four years.
She is poor. She is not yet beautiful. For all diploma she has the Polish baccalaureate. Why would she become “someone”? Besides, she loves Casimir, and waits for him.
Four years have not cooled the sentiments of the young man, probably exalted on the contrary by the obstacle … And he has lost nothing of his charm …
What he does not know, when he mentions their shared future, is that he now has a rival. And what a rival! A laboratory.
Where does she come from, this nervous young woman, who curiously combines timidity and assurance? It is a daughter of the earth, who has need of air, space, trees. She entertains with nature a relationship that is almost carnal. The plants know it and under her fingers blossom.
What she denies, on the other hand, is her animal part. Her brief angers, for example, which betray like a bolt of lightning what she is controlling in the way of concealed storms.
Poverty
Now, however, her father is deprived of his attributions, loses the lodging that accompanies them and half of his appointments.
How to join the two ends?
He gnaws at himself. Ah!
What afflicts her is not that she has only one dress, which must be made over by a seamstress, but that she does not see any way out of the tunnel in which she is engaged.
Then she is rescued by her sister.
Studies in Paris
French science, whose milk Marie Sklodowska has come to Paris to suck, happily has one great man, Pasteur, who is reaching the end of his life.
In Paris, she will spend her leisure time with her sister Bronia and Bronia’s own Casimir. Though they work hard they know how to amuse themselves, with Slavic hospitality. There are infinite discussions around the samovar and the piano in which they remake the world.
They organize parties, put on amateur spectacles, tableaux vivants: a young woman draped in a garnet tunic, her blond hair falling over her shoulders, incarnates Poland breaking its bonds while Paderewski plays Chopin in the wings: it’s Marie, proud of having been chosen.
But chatting pleasantly will never be her specialty.
Austerity
Her austerity sometimes borders on masochism. One night she is so cold in her fireless little room that she piles on her bed everything contained in her trunk along with a chair, while the water freezes in her basin.
She sometimes faints from having fed herself exclusively on radishes and tea. Bronia and Casimir rescue her and a cure of beefsteak puts her to rights.
Language
A summer passes. She perfects her French. When classes resume, she has driven out all the “Polishisms” from her vocabulary. Only the gently rolled r’s will bear witness until her last day to her Slavic origins, adding a certain charm to her voice that does not lack it already. And, like all the world, she will always calculate in her mother tongue.
License
Not only does she pass her exam, but when the results are announced before all the candidates in order of merit, her name is spoken first. Marie Sklodowska is licensed in physical sciences by the University of Paris. And it is admirable.
Courtship
Did she even notice, on the eve of her exam, that Sadi Carnot, the president of the Republic, was stabbed in his carriage by an Italian militant anarchist?
Perhaps she did not speak of it, even for an instant, with the physicist she has been seeing for several weeks, and who, as others offer chocolates, has brought her, when he has come to chat with her in her room, the offprint of an article titled “On symmetry in physical phenomena, the symmetry of an electric field and of a magnetic field.” The brochure is dedicated “To Mlle Sklodowska with the respect and the friendship of the author P. Curie.”
Together they speak enormously, but about physics or themselves.
And, everyone knows, to tolerate a person telling you about his childhood it is necessary to be in love with him.
Previous Loves
Marie has not attained twenty-six years, soon twenty-seven, she has not lived three years in Paris without having met at Bronia’s, at the Faculty, at the laboratory, representatives of the male species sensitive to her attractions. An enamored Polish student had once thought to swallow laudanum to make himself interesting in her eyes. Marie’s reaction: “That young man has no sense of priorities.”
In any case, they did not have the same.
Pierre
Pierre Curie has come on stage in Marie’s life at the precise moment at which it was suitable that he should appear.
The year 1894 has begun. Marie is assured of obtaining her license in July. She is beginning to look beyond, she is more available, and the spring is beautiful. Pierre is already captive to this singular little blond person.
It is clear that, making his way at once through the realms of the sublime and of theoretical physics, Pierre still finds himself alone at thirty-five years. And Marie Sklodowska very quickly appears to him as the Unique, capable of accompanying him there.
But lofty thinking is ill compensated. At thirty-six years, Pierre Curie earns thirty-six hundred francs per year at the School of Physics.
Bolt of Lightning
Marie Curie is over fifty years when she writes lines that describe their first meeting and she is never a woman to express herself, publicly at least, like the Portuguese Nun. But under the convention of the style and the eternal constraint certainly appears a little of what was, it seems, a reciprocal bolt of lightning.
Marie will be perceptibly longer in being convinced that she must alienate her independence, even to this physicist with limpid eyes.
Pierre Curie has said it to her: “Science, is your destiny.” Science, that is to say research pursued for practical ends.
Marie tells, in the stilted book she devotes to him: “Pierre Curie wrote me during the summer of 1894 letters which I think admirable taken as a whole.”
To one, Pierre adds a postscript: “I have shown your photograph to my brother. Was I wrong? He finds you very good. He says: ‘She has a look that is very decided and even stubborn.’ ”
Stubborn, oh how much!
She, always dressed in gray, gentle yet stern, childlike yet mature, sweet yet uncompromising … the woman from Poland.
He …
And then they …
Domestic Life
The only competition that Pierre has ever accepted and that he has just won is against Poland.
And thus it is in July 1894 that Marie takes, on the sly, lessons of a new kind with Bronia: How does one make a roast chicken? Fries? How does one feed a husband?
We know, on the other hand, that a cousin has the good idea of sending a check as a wedding present. That the check is exchanged for two bicycles. And that the “little queen,” the entirely new invention th
at became the darling of the French, will be the honeymoon vehicle of M. and Mme Pierre Curie.
The bicycle, is freedom.
Research
To extract uranium from pitchblende, there are at that time factories. To extract radium from it, there is a woman in a hangar.
She is sure of her method. But her means are derisory.
Working with Radium
Marie gives birth to a daughter, yet does not take time off from work. Why are they so tired, the Curies, when they arrive, with Irene who is cutting her seventh tooth, at Auroux where they have rented a house for the summer?
They struggle to swim in the river and they struggle on their bicycles. And Marie has the tips of her fingers chapped, painful. She does not know, nor Pierre either, that they are beginning to suffer from the irradiation of the radioactive substances they are manipulating.
It is in the following December, on a page of the black notebook not precisely dated and bearing Pierre’s writing, that appears for the first time the word radium.
What remains is to prove the existence of the new element. “I would like it to have a beautiful color,” says Pierre.
Pure salts of radium are colorless, quite simply. But their own radiations color with a blue-mauve tint the glass tubes that contain them. In sufficient quantity, their radiations provoke a visible glow in the darkness.
When that glow begins to irradiate in the darkness of the laboratory, Pierre is happy.
Children
Marie makes jams and the clothes of her daughters out of a spirit of thrift. Not from zeal.
Relationship
When it comes to mathematics, he judges her stronger than he and says it good and loud. She, for her part, admires in her companion “the sureness and the rigor of his reasonings, the surprising suppleness with which he can change the object of his research …”
Each of them has a very high idea of the value of the other.
Fellow Workers
An aura has been created that attracts and impresses at the same time. The echo of their works, the radiance of Pierre, the intensity of Marie, that force which is all the more moving because the young blond woman appears more and more slender under her black smock, the couple they form, the almost religious spirit of their scientific engagement, their asceticism, all this has attracted young researchers in their wake.
A disheveled chemist, André Debierne, will enter the life of the Curies never to leave it again.
Marie Curie is neither a saint nor a martyr. She is young at a time when most women oscillate between remorse and hysteria, either guilty or “out of their bodies.”
Genius: Radioactivity
In fact, two German researchers announce that radioactive substances have physiological effects. Pierre immediately exposes his arm deliberately to a source of radium. With happiness, he sees a lesion form.
To be recognized by their peers—the Curies certainly appreciate that satisfaction. Besides, it is “fair.”
Now, it happens that at night she gets up and starts to wander through the sleeping house. Little crises of somnambulism that alarm Pierre. Or it is he who is ravaged by pains that alter his sleep. Marie watches over him, worried, powerless.
And her appearance? Marie is sitting next to Lord Kelvin, in her “formal dress.” She has only one, still the same after ten years, black, with a discreet neckline. In truth, it is better that she has no love of toilette, because she has no taste at all and never will have. Black—which distinguishes her, because it is not customary to wear it—and gray to which she has subscribed out of convenience, settle matters well and make a good setting for her ash-blond hair.
Fame
There exists a threshold beyond which disdain for honors borders on affectation, and one would be tempted to think that Marie Curie has crossed it when she complains, in sum, at having received, with Pierre, the Nobel Prize.
Wrested from their bowl, our two goldfish suffocate and thrash about. No, they wish no banquet; no, they wish no tour of America; no, they do not wish to visit the Automobile Show.
However, they are both unconditional admirers of Wagner.
The Death of Pierre
He takes the train back from the country Monday evening, carrying a bouquet of ranunculus.
Marie returns Wednesday evening. The rain has resumed in Paris.
The next day, Thursday, Pierre is on his way from his publisher, Gauthier-Villars, to the Institute. The rain has started again. He opens his umbrella. The rue Dauphine is narrow, congested, he crosses behind a fiacre …
As always, he is absentminded … Approaching the fiacre in the opposite direction, the driver of a wagon with two horses, coming from the quays and going up the rue Dauphine, sees appear before his left horse a man in black, an umbrella … The man totters, he tries to seize the horse’s harness … Hampered by his umbrella, he has slipped between the two horses which their driver has attempted with all his strength to hold back. But the weight of the heavy wagon, five meters long and loaded with military equipment, drags him forward. It is the back left wheel that crushes Pierre’s skull. And now that famous brain, that beloved brain, seeps out on the wet cobblestones …
