The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  The following week, Jean Perrin “was astounded to see Mme. Curie run to me as I was entering the house. She had been waiting for me for several hours. . . . She said that she had been insulted in the street in crude terms by Mme. Langevin and by her sister, Mme. Bourgeois, and that this woman had threatened her [and demanded that Marie] leave France. . . . I think I will never forget the emotion I felt seeing the distress to which this illustrious woman had been reduced . . . wandering like a beast being tracked.” The next day, Perrin went to try to talk some sense into Jeanne, but she “shouted threats for everyone to hear, that if Mme. Curie didn’t leave in eight days she would kill her.”

  Perrin arranged for a meeting of Jeanne, Paul, and Jeanne’s brother-in-law, Henri Bourgeois, an editor at Le Petit Journal. They agreed that, in exchange for Paul’s no longer seeing Marie either personally or professionally, Jeanne would end her campaign. However, that the terminally aggrieved wife had a journalist for a relative and an ally remained a serious threat, for in belle epoque Paris, the tabloids had a loud public voice. Historian Barbara Tuchman: “Variegated, virulent, turbulent, literary, inventive, personal, conscienceless and often vicious, the daily newspapers of Paris were the liveliest and the most important elements in public life [and] represented every conceivable shade of opinion, calling themselves Republican, Conservative, Catholic, Socialist, Nationalist, Bonapartist, Legitimist, Independent, Absolutely Independent, Conservative Catholic, Conservative Monarchist, Republican Liberal, Republican Socialist, Republican Independent, Republican Progressivist, Republican Radical Socialist. Some were morning, some were evening, some had illustrated supplements. At four to six pages, they covered, besides the usual political and foreign affairs, news of the haut monde, of le turf, of fashion, of theater and opera, concerts and art, the salons and the Academy. . . . The press was daily wine, meat and bread to Paris. Major careers and a thousand minor ones were made in journalism. Everyone from Academicians to starving Anarchists made a supplementary living from it.” Additionally, in this society at this time, married men were assumed to squire mistresses. But those mistresses were supposed to be socially invisible, not the most famous Frenchwoman in the world.

  After returning from the International Congress of Radiology and Electricity in September of 1910—underwritten by sodium carbonate magnate Ernest Solvay and attended in Brussels by Albert Einstein, quantum discoverer Max Planck, Marie’s neighbor Jean Perrin, as well as Paul Langevin—Marie vacationed with her children at L’Arcouëst on the Breton coast, a spot so overrun with Sorbonne professors it was nicknamed Port Science. There, she wrote Paul an echo of what Pierre had written to her so many years before: “I spent yesterday evening and night thinking of you, of the hours that we have spent together and of which I have kept a delicious memory. I still see your good and tender eyes, your charming smile, and I think only of the moment when I will find again all the sweetness of your presence. . . . It would be so good to gain the freedom to see each other as much as our various occupations permit, to work together, to walk or to travel together. . . . What couldn’t come out of this feeling, instinctive and so spontaneous and so compatible with our intellectual needs, to which it seems so admirably adapted? I believe that we could derive everything from it: good work in common, a good solid friendship, courage for life and even beautiful children of love in the most beautiful meaning of the word.” They renewed their affair and returned to chez nous.

  On October 31, 1910, one of the Immortals, chemist Désiré Gernez, died, meaning an Académie Française chair was in contention. Marie was the only French laureate who was not a member, even though she had been elected to equivalent organizations in Sweden, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the United States, and Russia. If she won, she’d be the first woman in the Institut de France’s 215-year history; her competition was Édouard Branly, inventor of the wireless coherer, an element of the telegraph. The French tabloids turned the contest into breathless headlines, with French nationalists and the Catholic Church supporting Branly. At the January 4, 1911, meeting, the vote to admit women as academy members failed, 85 to 60, upholding “immutable tradition.” During the ensuing science-branch vote, astronomer Henri Deslandres explained how it was so “very difficult to judge the works of Mme. Curie and to separate her research from the inspired work of M. Curie.” Branly won, and for the next eleven years, Curie’s research could not be published in the most globally read French science journal, Comptes rendus.

  In the spring of 1911, Paul and Marie opened the door of chez nous to discover that someone had broken in and stolen their love letters. Tabloid editor/brother-in-law Henri Bourgeois informed Marie that Jeanne had hired the thief, and that he would now use the letters to scandalize the world and destroy Curie’s reputation. Jean Perrin advised Marie to leave town until things calmed down, and she did, attending a scientific conference in Genoa where she poured out her troubles to another attendee, Sorbonne science dean Paul Appell’s daughter, Marguerite Borel, who recalled “under the austere scientist, the tender and lively woman, capable of walking through fire for those she loves.”

  On November 4, Le Journal’s front page heralded, “A Story of Love: Madame Curie and Professor Langevin. . . . The fires of radium which beam so mysteriously . . . have just lit a fire in the heart of one of the scientists who studies their action so devotedly; and the wife and the children of this scientist are in tears.” The following day, Bourgeois’s paper, Le Petit Journal, also had a front-page report, and the two papers began to duel over plots and sources. The Curie-Langevin affair became known as “the greatest sensation in Paris since the theft of the Mona Lisa.”

  Three days later, Reuters announced that the first woman laureate now would be the first man or woman to have two Nobels. The 1903 award had been in physics, for the discovery of radioactivity; now she would receive the 1911 chemistry prize for discovering radium and plutonium. But when the Scandinavians learned of the French hubbub, there was an effort to disinvite her, with laureate Svante Arrhenius writing Marie, “I beg you to stay in France; no one can calculate what might happen here.” Albert Einstein told her, “I am convinced that you [should] continue to hold this riffraff in contempt. . . . If the rabble continues to be occupied with you, simply stop reading that drivel. Leave it to the vipers it was fabricated for.”

  To end the war of love, Jeanne demanded full custody of the four children and a thousand francs in monthly support. Paul refused. She went to court, charging him with “consorting with a concubine in the marital dwelling,” including as evidence the stolen love letters. On November 23, alongside ten pages of the Curie-Langevin epistles, L’Oeuvre explained that since Marie was Polish, this affair proved “France in the grip of the bunch of dirty foreigners, who pillage it, soil it and dishonor it.”

  On December 10, 1911, Marie Curie, accompanied by Bronya and Irène, attended the Nobel ceremonies in Stockholm. The scandal in France had no effect on the Swedish ceremony; in fact, King Gustaf himself would be accused, years later, of carrying on a sordid love affair with a married man—something not even thousands of kronor could keep from being made public. Meanwhile, L’Action Française and L’Intransigeant daily attacked Mme. Curie on their front pages, calling her work “overrated” and explaining her alien perfidy: “There is a mother, a French mother who . . . wants only to keep her children. . . . She has above all the eternal force of the truth on her side. She will triumph.” By the end of December, L’Oeuvre claimed that Marie’s middle name was Salome and that “her father is in fact a converted Jew.” Marie and Irène returned home to Sceaux to find a mob outside their house screaming, “Down with the foreigner, the husband-stealer!” Marguerite Borel took the Curies in, which angered her father, the Sorbonne’s science dean. He told her that the university was planning to suggest that Marie leave France.

  On December 29 at the age of forty-four, Marie was rushed by ambulance to a hospital bed, where she spent nearly a month recovering from a kidney infection. Ever
yone in Paris assumed that she was pregnant with Paul’s baby. She had an operation in March, and instead of returning to Sceaux, where mobs still gathered, she rented an apartment in Paris. Now she was ashamed at what she had done to the name of her husband and began officially calling herself Madame Skłodowska. She insisted that, when Irène wrote her letters, she use that name, and not Mme. Curie (privately, both daughters called her Mé). She did no lab work for fourteen months.

  Eventually, five armed duels were conducted over the affair, and Paul and Jeanne settled out of court, she getting the full custody and eight hundred francs in support—nearly everything she’d asked for before publishing the letters. Marie and Paul’s romance, though, did not survive. By 1914, Paul and Jeanne were reunited, and soon after, with her assent, he took another mistress.

  At the start of the press frenzy, Marie was the most famous woman in the world, a living symbol of the great heights to which women could now aspire, regardless of the inane voting of the French academy. Afterward, she was a home-wrecking, foreign Jewess whose saintly French husband had killed himself when he learned of her many adulteries. L’affaire Curie riveted the French press for longer than the actual romance had lasted. Daughter Ève’s biography, Madame Curie, published in 1937, three years after her mother’s death, was in many ways an effort to rein in the Langevin scandal in history and keep it from tainting her mother’s legacy. Marie’s heirs then arranged that the Curie-Langevin letters and the Perrin testimony would be hidden for four decades in the archives of the Paris city school that had been Pierre and Marie’s professional home.

  In time, Marie’s granddaughter Hélène and Paul’s grandson Michel would fall in love and get married. But most crucially, Paul Langevin would be an agent for Marie’s last great triumph, the shocking professional ascension of her daughter Irène.

  As the German front line marched toward Paris in the autumn of 1914, the city evacuated, leaving it deserted to the poor, the struggling working class, and Marie Curie, who stayed behind to safeguard her just-built laboratory and its precious cache of radium. She then realized what she could really do for the war effort was bring X-ray technology to wounded soldiers on the front lines, and she tried to equip Red Cross hospitals with bare-bones radiology departments, but so many of them didn’t even have electricity that the effort made little progress. She then saw that an automobile with a generator running from its motor; a supply of glass vacuum cathode tubes; a radioscopic screen; photographic plates and chemicals; an armature to position the tube over the needed target in the body; a table for the patient to lie on; black curtains to create the necessary darkness; and an operator’s lead apron would be invaluable in saving lives—a mobile X-ray lab; a voiture radiologique, which in the field became known as petite Curies.

  As soon as possible, Irène returned from their Port Science summer home on the Breton seaside—the Curies now had an Île Saint-Louis apartment, a seaside house of white plaster in l’Arcouëst, and another house on the Mediterranean in Cavalaire—to take a course in nursing, get her diploma, and truly become her mother’s daughter. On November 1, 1914, Marie, Irène, a mechanic, and a driver rode a petite Curie to the army hospital in Creil, the first of thirty trips the women would make to the front. With seven hundred thousand francs donated by the French charity Patronage de blessés, Marie established two hundred radiology clinics and outfitted eighteen mobile labs. In 1915 when Irène turned eighteen, she began teaching women how to be X-ray technicians and traveled the country to solve problems with the various labs and outposts, all while qualifying for her Sorbonne certificats in math, physics, and chemistry.

  At war’s end, Poland became an independent republic for the first time in 123 years.

  In May of 1920, Marie met her greatest and most useful fan, Marie “Missy” Meloney, the editor of a wildly popular American women’s magazine, the Delineator, and the Oprah Winfrey of her day. Missy’s opinion was that Curie was “the Greatest Woman in the World,” who deserved immense financial support from the United States. In fact, because of her long-standing relationships with industry and her glossy fame that attracted well-to-do benefactors, few scientists in the world—and perhaps not a single one—were better supplied in every way than Marie Curie. But after Marie told Missy that America had nearly fifty times as much radium as the one gram its discoverer possessed, Missy began a “Marie Curie Radium Campaign.” Giving her readers story after story on Marie’s poverty and her likelihood of curing cancer—both wildly exaggerated—in eight months Missy raised $100,000 to buy Marie a gram of radium, which the editor finagled to be given to the scientist, at the White House, by Warren G. Harding. In his ceremonial speech on May 20, 1921, the president of the United States echoed the recently passed Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the vote—which they would not have in France for another quarter of a century: “As a nation whose womanhood has been exalted to fullest participation in citizenship, we are proud to honor in you a woman whose work has earned universal acclaim and attested woman’s equality in every intellectual and spiritual activity.”

  The New York Times trumpeted her arrival with a front-page story, “Mme. Curie Plans to End All Cancers,” and noted that her Carnegie Hall appearance before thirty-five hundred was “the largest meeting of American college women ever held in this country.” Throughout the trip, Marie suffered dizziness, nausea, and anemia—the same health troubles that had so weakened Pierre—and had to cancel a number of appearances, sending Ève and Irène in her stead. But her appearances were electrifying. Dressed all in black, her health damaged into frailty by occupational radiance, yet still commanding that historic staunch presence, Marie Curie had what one audience member described as the moral force of a Buddhist monk. The public would further understand this extraordinary woman as explained by Hollywood, through Greer Garson:

  Pierre:

  “What if there is a kind of matter in the world we never even dreamed of? What would that mean?”

  Marie:

  “What if there exists a matter which is not inert, but alive, dynamic?”

  Pierre:

  “Marie, that would mean our whole conception of the nature of matter would have to be changed.”

  Marie went to Warsaw for another great triumph, the inauguration of a Polish institute under her name, to be managed by Bronya. At the front of its plaza stood an immense effigy of Manya Skłodowska Curie, the same statue that would regularly draw the contemplative gaze of one Casimir Zorawski. Then in 1925, Paul Langevin recommended that Marie hire one of his recent graduates, Jean-Frédéric Joliot, as a junior lab assistant. Like Pierre Curie, Fred did not have an elevated academic provenance, but he had graduated first in his engineering class at Pierre and Paul’s alma mater, the Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry. Just as Paul had been a student of Pierre’s, so Fred was a student of Paul’s, and like his mentor, Fred was brilliant, charming, and appallingly handsome. Soon after his appointment, Fred and the rather plain Irène, who’d just won her doctorate for studying polonium’s alpha rays, fell in love. “I rediscovered in [Pierre Curie’s] daughter the same purity, his good sense, his humility,” Fred crooned. Marie, though, was far from won over, writing brother Józef that the Joliots were “well-respected but they are industrialists.”

  On October 9, 1926, Irène, age twenty-nine, married Fred, twenty-six. That romantic quickness unnerved Marie, who insisted the groom sign a prenuptial agreement, which included that, whatever happened in their marital future, Irène would retain the Curie radium. A bit later, Marie in a letter secretly revealed why she was still not a fan of her first son: “I miss Irène a lot. We were so close for such a long time. Of course, we often see each other, but it’s not the same.”

  Fred, though, refused to let his mother-in-law consider herself abandoned. The newlyweds ate dinner with Mé four times a week until she accepted him all out as a member of the family, finally admitting to Jean Perrin, “That young man is a ball of fire.” Irèn
e: “My mother and my husband often debated with such ardor, answering back and forth so rapidly, that I couldn’t get a word in and was obliged to insist on having a say when I wanted to express an opinion.”

  In time, Madame’s early fears proved wholly unfounded. Fred and Irène had a long and happy marriage, while their partnership as physicists would accomplish so much that they would emerge from her parents’ burdensome professional shadow. At first, the couple struggled with the financial sacrifice of pure research; a number of times, Fred thought he should leave the Institut for a better-paying job in private industry. But in 1928, they began publishing jointly, and just as Pierre and Marie were better together than apart, Fred and Irène were unbeatable, striking scientific pay dirt again and again.

  In 1931, the Joliot-Curies showed that when beryllium, a lightweight metal, was bombarded with alpha particles from polonium, it gave off powerful rays that could make protons burst at high speed from the atomic nuclei in paraffin wax. They concluded that the rays were a new type of gamma ray, the most powerful form of particle radiation then known, and called them recoil protons. Reading their articles in Rome, physicist Ettore Majorana said to his colleagues, “What fools. They have discovered the neutral proton and they do not even recognize it,” and when British chemist James Chadwick repeated their experiment, he, too, realized that the rays included a new kind of subatomic particle, which he called the neutron. He later won a Nobel Prize for this insight, instead of the Joliot-Curies. Fred and Irène then completed another experiment with another mistake about odd results. This time, they ceded the discovery of the positron to C. D. Anderson.