The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  Then, for a number of years, Casimir wavered, telling Manya he loved her and had to have her as his bride and, alternately, that he had to accede to his parents’ wishes. She wrote Henrietta on April 4, 1887, “If [men] don’t want to marry impecunious young girls, let them go to the devil! Nobody is asking them anything. But why do they offend by troubling the peace of an innocent creature?” On November 25, 1888: “I have fallen into black melancholy. . . . My existence strangely resembles that of one of those slugs which haunt the dirty water of our river. . . . I was barely 18 when I came here, and what I have not been through! . . . I feel everything very violently, with a physical violence, and then I give myself a shaking, the vigor of my nature conquers, and it seems to me that I’m coming out of my nightmare. . . . First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events.”

  The tormented young woman tried drowning herself in her studies, reading ferociously after dinner every night—sociology, literature, history, even an advanced math course she completed, by mail, with help from her father. Repeatedly her interests and her talents were sparked by physics and chemistry, so much so that she convinced one of the factory chemists to give her lessons. Then the Zorawskis learned that Casimir and Manya were still illicitly seeing each other. She was fired. Completely heartbroken, Manya returned to Warsaw, lived with her father, worked at a few more governess jobs, and, through her cousin Joseph, got laboratory experience at the clandestine Museum of Industry and Agriculture, where Joseph illegally educated a generation of Polish scientists.

  Then in March 1890, Manya received a letter from Bronya. The elder sister announced she was engaged to a very different Casimir—a man who would be deported to Siberia if he ever returned to the Russian empire, as he was believed to be one of the conspirators behind Czar Alexander II’s assassination—and that her studies were complete. Now it was Manya’s turn, and Bronya invited her littlest sister to come to Paris to live with the new couple and be supported financially, as promised so long ago. But now, Manya wavered, for she was still so much in love. Finally in the fall of 1891, Casimir Zorawski wrote to say that their relationship was categorically finished. Manya left Poland, for Paris.

  But this is not the end of that story. After growing up to become a well-regarded mathematician in Poland, the adult Casimir Zorawski would frequently be seen gazing up at Warsaw’s monumental statue of the nation’s great heroine, Marie Curie, the “penniless nobody” he had lost forever.

  Born November 7, 1867, in the province of Vistula Land, a Poland brutally ruled by a vengeful Moscow, Marja Skłodowska was the baby of her family and like all Polish husbands, wives, pets, children, and cherished possessions, she and her brothers and sisters all had nicknames. Zofia was Zosia; Bronisława, Bronya; Helen, Hela; Joseph, Jozio; and the youngest, Marja, went by Manya, Manyusya, and Anciupeccio. The birth of her fifth and last child led mother Bronya to resign her position as head of a Warsaw school, where the family had resided in complimentary housing; she now worked from home, as a cobbler. Then, she became ill, the beginnings of a family cataclysm. Bronya had been taking care of her husband’s younger brother, sickened with tuberculosis. The brother passed, and soon enough Bronya herself was infected, having likely contracted the disease from her good intentions.

  Three years before Manya’s birth, Polish nationalists waged revolutionary assaults against the Russian colonial authorities and were defeated. Tens of thousands were interned in Siberian slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands fled to live in exile, and the rulers began a program of “Russification.” Manya’s daughter, Eve: “For the children, the dreadful nature of Czarist occupation was in the Russian-appointed head of the gymnasium, Ivanov. They were taught that Poland was a province and their language a dialect, and forced to recite their Catholic prayers in Russian.” Manya: “Constantly held in suspicion and spied upon, the children knew that a single conversation in Polish, or an imprudent word, might seriously harm, not only themselves, but also their families.”

  Manya’s grandparents had been comfortably well-to-do, and the furniture in the family’s study revealed this prosperous ancestry: a desk of French mahogany, Restoration armchairs in red velvet, a green malachite clock, a table inlaid with a marble checkerboard; the portrait of a bishop; and a collection of scientific apparatuses, including an oak-mounted barometer and a gold-leaf electroscope. But Manya’s parents’ sympathies with the Polish liberation movement destroyed their earnings as a state-employed teacher and school administrator, and that combined with poor investments erased their inheritance.

  Eve described what happened next: “While his wife was being treated on the Riviera in Nice, his brother-in-law had lost 30,000 rubles of the family’s money in a steam mill; the father was forced to take in boarders. The proper family was unraveled into chaos and cacophony; Manya had to study with her thumbs in her ears. But she became so absorbed in whatever she turned her mind to that the family made a joke of making a tremendous noise around her and watching as she continued to read and pay them no attentions.” The girl would have this power of concentration for the rest of her life, as Manya herself said, “Weak as I am, in order not to let my mind fly away on every wind that blows, yielding to the slightest breath it encounters, it would be necessary either to have everything motionless around me, or else, speeding on like a humming top, in movement itself to be rendered impervious to external things. . . . One must make of life a dream, and of that dream a reality.”

  Mother Bronya then returned from Nice, her condition unimproved. Eve: “One of the boarders infected Bronya and Zosia with typhus, killing the elder sister. Their mother, too weak to leave the house, watched from the windows as the cortege took her first born away forever.” Manya was eight when her beautiful sister Zosia died, but this was not the end of the family’s sorrow. The children prayed every night for their mother’s health to be restored, but on May 9, 1878, she died as well. Manya was ten, and “would often sit in some corner and cry bitterly. Her tears could not be stopped by anybody,” sister Hela said, while Manya remembered, “For many years we all felt weighing on us the loss of the one who had been the soul of the house.” The family was forced to sell their country home, but at least some of their friends and relatives still had estates, where they were invited to spend the summers, tramping the woods for mushrooms and whortleberries, playing dress-up as traditional peasants, riding horse-drawn sleighs, and waltzing at night to fiddlers on the lawn. Manya: “We sleep sometimes at night and sometimes by day, we dance, and we run to such follies that sometimes we deserve to be locked up in an asylum for the insane.”

  Traveling as economically as possible, Manya Skłodowska left Warsaw for Paris carrying not only enough food and reading for the trip, but also a folding chair and a blanket, as German fourth-class travel did not include seats. She then joined Bronya and her husband at their apartment on the rue d’Allemagne at the city’s edge in smelling distance of la Villette, the abattoir. Twice a day the small, young foreign woman climbed the spiral staircase of a horse-drawn double-decker omnibus for the hour-long commute to and from the Sorbonne. The top section, open to the elements and known as the imperial, held the cheapest seats, with the best views. It was impossible, but she was in Paris, taking classes at the finest university in all of continental Europe. She filled out her registration card not as Marja or Manya, but as Marie Skłodowska, half-French, and half-foreign, with a surname no one but a Pole could pronounce—regardless, everyone who knew her forever called her Manya. Marie’s educational background and laboratory experience were dramatically scantier than that of her fellow classmates, and she struggled to keep up with schooling and with the mysteries of the French tongue. Stubborn, shy, dressed in the gray-wool-and-pomegranate-linen dress of a poor immigrant scraping through life, Marie was nevertheless a striking woman, with ash-blond hair and porcelain complexion. She was so pretty that one of her friends told a group of boys to leave them alone or risk a beating from her parapluie.

>   Bronya and Casimir turned their apartment into petite Pologne, with every night a gathering of homesick Varsovians in exile, enjoying wine, cake, vodka, tea, and a piano player by the name of Ignaz Paderewski, all in heated conversation over science and politics—two future presidents of Poland were among the regulars. It was a glorious reminder of home, and it was also too much of a distraction for an overburdened university student. After six months, Marie moved into a sixth-floor chambre de bonne—a one-room garret—at 3 rue Flatters off boulevard de Port-Royal in the quartier latin, paying twenty-five francs a month, with no hot water as she couldn’t afford heat. Sometimes, she fainted from hunger. Her first real adult home had a folding iron bed, a white wooden table, a big brown trunk (which could be sat on in an emergency), an oil lamp, a stove, an alcohol-fed oven, a washing tub, one fork, one knife, one spoon, one cup, one cooking pan, two plates, and one teakettle with three glasses for herself and her only guests, the relatives. She knew how to sew, but never made herself any clothes, only repairing her Polish outfits again and again. On nights when it was too cold to sleep, she put everything she owned—clothes, coats, towels—on top of her coverlet, then put the single chair on top of all of it to weigh everything down and perhaps give at least the illusion of warmth. “My situation was not exceptional; it was the familiar experience of many of the Polish students whom I knew,” she wrote later. “I carried the little coal I used up six flights. . . . I prepared my meals with the aid of an alcohol lamp. . . . It gave me a precious sense of liberty and independence. . . . [This was] one of the best memories of my life.”

  After all her troubles as a university student, undereducated because she was a woman and foreign-born, Marie finished first in her master’s-degree physics course in the summer of 1893 and second in math the following year. Then a miraculous stroke of luck came her way: the same friend who’d defended her on the streets with an umbrella got her awarded the Alexandrovitch scholarship—six hundred rubles—enough for over a year of living expenses. She was saved. The following year, she was awarded her master’s in mathematics, and by then, she spoke perfect French with a bare whisper of Polish flavor. In a few years’ time, she would have her first paid assignment, and out of those fees she would repay, for the first time in its history, the scholarship, so another impoverished student could be given help when it was most needed.

  Before completing the math degree, she was commissioned by the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry to do a study aligning the magnetic properties of different steels to their chemical compositions. She needed to find a lab where she could do this work, and a friend she’d met while working for the Zorawskis knew someone who might have a room, a teacher at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville (the city’s industrial engineering and chemistry school). Additionally, this friend of a friend of a friend had a number of remarkable similarities to Marie. She was investigating the magnetic properties of steel, and this city schoolteacher had discovered a remarkable interaction of heat and magnetism; Marie was educated outside any state system through the Floating University and her program of self-education while working as a governess, while Pierre had been homeschooled by his parents, his brother, and a tutor before qualifying to enter the Sorbonne. They were both workaholics, with his family nearly as well educated and as financially precarious as the Skłodowskas. And they were both outsiders in the French scientific community, who expected their members to have a Polytechnique education like the Becquerels.

  Marie: “Pierre’s intellectual capacities were not those which would permit the rapid assimilation of a prescribed course of studies. His dreamer’s spirit would not submit itself to the ordering of the intellectual effort imposed by the school. . . . He grew up in all freedom, developing his taste for natural science through his excursions into the country, where he collected plants and animals for his father.” Pierre: “I did not regret my nights passed in the woods, and my solitary days. If I had the time I would let myself recount my musings. I would describe my delicious valley, filled with the perfume of aromatic plants, the beautiful mass of foliage, so fresh and so humid, that hung over the Bievre, the fairy palace with its colonnade of hops, the stony hills, red with heather. . . . We must eat, sleep, be idle, have sex, love, touch the sweetest things in life and yet not succumb to them.”

  Pierre Curie had fallen in love as a young man, but then the girl died, and a lack of income forced him to put off work toward his doctorate indefinitely. Instead, he became a poorly paid laboratory instructor at the city school; at the age of thirty-five, he was still living with his parents. Working with elder brother Jacques, Pierre studied crystals—quartz, tourmaline, topaz, sugar—and found that, when they were compressed along the axis of symmetry, they produced a charge—piezoelectricity (from the Greek, “to squeeze”). For the precise measurements needed for this work, the physicist brothers created a highly sensitive instrument that combined tiny weights, microscopic meter readers, and pneumatic dampeners—the Curie scale. Then, heating various materials to 1,400°C (over 2,500°F), they discovered a link between heat and magnetism. Today the temperature that a given element loses its magnetism, the Curie point, is used in studying plate tectonics, treating hypothermia, measuring the caffeine in beverages, and understanding extraterrestrial magnetic fields, while piezoelectricity is found in mechanisms propelling the droplets of ink-jet printers, regulating time in quartz watches, controlling the shrill wail of smoke detectors, turning the adjustable lenses of autofocus cameras, acting as the pickups of electric guitars, giving a spark to electric cigarette lighters, reducing vibrations within tennis rackets, and sending out high-frequency audio to monitor the heartbeats of fetuses.

  Lord Kelvin was so taken with the Curie brothers’ work on electric quartz that he arranged for a number of visits with Pierre in his lab the first week of October 1893, the same period that the impoverished teacher was meeting the great love of his life. Marie Curie: “As I entered the room, Pierre Curie was standing in the recess of a French window opening on a balcony. He seemed to me very young, though he was at that time thirty-five years old. I was struck by the open expression of his face and by the slight suggestion of detachment in his whole attitude. His speech, rather slow and deliberate, his simplicity, and his smile, at once grave and youthful, inspired confidence. . . . There was, between his conceptions and mine, despite the difference between our native countries, a surprising kinship, no doubt attributable to a certain likeness in the moral atmosphere in which we were both raised by our families. . . . Soon he caught the habit of speaking to me of his dream of an existence consecrated entirely to scientific research, and he asked me to share that life. It was not, however, easy for me to make such a decision, for it meant separation from my country and my family, and the renouncement of certain social projects that were dear to me. Having grown up in an atmosphere of patriotism kept alive by the oppression of Poland, I wished, like many other young people of my country, to contribute my effort toward the conservation of our national spirit.”

  Marie was the first woman Pierre had encountered in fifteen years who was both attractive physically and shared his great passion for science. She felt likewise; besides his professional achievements, Marie “noticed the grave and gentle expression of his face, as well as a certain abandon in his attitude, suggesting the dreamer absorbed in his reflections.” But then he asked if she planned to remain in France permanently, and she said, “Certainly not. . . . I shall be a teacher in Poland; I shall try to be useful. Poles have no right to abandon their country.”

  After a few months passed, Marie made plans for a trip to Warsaw, for a vacation with her family, and to apply to graduate school in her native country. Pierre suddenly insisted, “Promise me that you will come back! If you stay in Poland you can’t possibly continue your studies. You have no right to abandon science.” Marie later said that she felt what Pierre really meant by this was “You have no right to abandon me.” But she could never,
in turn, imagine abandoning Poland, or marrying a man who wasn’t Polish, and only allowed Pierre to consider themselves as friends.

  While Marie was away, a torrent of letters arrived from Pierre in his childlike writing, signed “your very devoted friend” and begging her to return: “We promised each other (isn’t it true?) to have, for each other, at least a great affection. As long as you do not change your mind! For there are no promises which hold: these are things that do not admit of compulsion.” Pierre “had a touching desire to know all that was dear to me,” Marie said. He even learned a bit of her difficult native language and, when she finally returned in October, made a remarkably abject offer: he would move to Poland and find some kind of position, if only she would marry him. Pierre Curie: “It would, nevertheless, be a beautiful thing in which I hardly dare believe, to pass through life together hypnotized in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science. Of all these dreams, I believe the last, alone, is legitimate. I mean to say by this that we are powerless to change the social order. Even if this were not true we should not know what to do. And in working without understanding we should never be sure that we were not doing more harm than good, by retarding some inevitable evolution. From the point of view of science, on the contrary, we can pretend to accomplish something. The territory here is more solid and obvious, and however small it is, it is truly in our possession.”