Marie Curie (2 page)

Technically, Poland no longer existed. Many people around Marie wore black clothes at all times, in a state of mourning for their former country. Once it had been a mighty kingdom, but by 1795, it had been cut up into pieces claimed by Austria, Prussia, and Russia. Warsaw was under the rule of the Russian czar, who strove to wipe out Polish language and culture. Poles who resisted were sent to the remotest part of Russia—the frozen wasteland of Siberia—and never seen again. Others were hanged—like the brother of one of Marie’s friends—their bodies left dangling for weeks as warnings. Many of the most educated Poles chose to leave home rather than risk winding up in a labor camp or at the end of a noose. Paris, France, became a haven for Polish nationalists working to get their country back.

Marie’s father, Wladyslaw Sklodowski, had trained for a career in science, but under Russian rule, Poles were forbidden to work in laboratories. Suspected of being a nationalist, he had to make do with unsteady work as a teacher of mathematics and physics.

Her mother, Bronislawa, was unusually well educated for a woman of her time. After graduating from Warsaw’s best private school for girls, she worked there ever after, eventually becoming the principal. A top-notch education for all five of her children was her highest priority. She even made it known that the better they did at school, the more she loved them.

The family belonged to a part of Polish aristocracy called
szlachta
—they had lost their land and wealth, but not their love of culture. Possessing material goods was not considered as worthwhile as sacrifice in the name of a cause. Bronislawa, with five growing children to support, didn’t consider herself above working with her hands. After buying the proper tools, she taught herself how to cobble so she could make her family’s shoes. To Marie she was “the soul of the house,” a true heroine.

As a baby crawling into her father’s study, Marie studied the barometer on the wall, an instrument that recorded air pressure and changes in weather. A few years later, she was fascinated with his locked glass cabinet of physics equipment—shiny glass tubes, scales, an electroscope, which was a device for detecting an electric charge.

Marie was only four the first time she read aloud. Her siblings reacted with shock, which made her burst into tears—she thought she had done something wrong. By hanging around them, she had taught herself to read. Soon she was helping
them
with their math homework.

Tragedy struck that same year. Bronislawa contracted tuberculosis, a lung disease for which no cure yet existed. The sound of her coughing could be heard all over the house. For fear of passing on the disease, she stopped kissing or cuddling the children. If Marie tried to embrace her, Bronislawa held up a hand to ward her off. She often had to go away for rest cures at sanatoriums in the mountains (fresh air and quiet were believed to help). Zosia, the oldest daughter, accompanied and nursed her mother from the time she was eleven.

When Marie was eight, Zosia was fatally stricken with typhus, another incurable disease. Her death dealt a harsh blow to the whole family, especially Bronislawa, who weakened.

Two years later, Marie wore her dead sister’s coat to her mother’s funeral.

Afterward she fell into the first of the profound depressions that descended upon her at various points throughout her life. Her way of coping was to shut down emotionally. She hardly spoke and buried herself in books, obsessing about a particular subject.

As times got harder for the family, Wladyslaw temporarily opened a school right in his own house, every corner of it filled with boys, some of whom boarded there. Marie slept in the living room, carving out precious time for homework after others went to bed. Then at six, she was up again to help prepare breakfast for twenty people at a time. Yet her sadness eventually lifted, perhaps as a result of forcing herself to keep so busy.

Education became an obsession. Marie thought of her father as her personal encyclopedia—he always had the answers. All of his lessons had the effect of making her aware of an invisible universe around her. Wladyslaw turned everything, even a walk in the woods, into a moral or educational lesson. Watching a sunset while hiking in the Carpathian Mountains meant a lecture on astronomy. Her father used games and playtime as ways to teach. When the children were young, they spent hours with blocks of various shapes and colors, learning about geography and reenacting battles. When they were older, they clipped pictures from magazines to make collages for their history lessons. Saturday nights they listened to Wladyslaw read aloud, usually novels by the popular English writer Charles dickens.

He also taught them small ways to resist Russian rule. Above all, it was important to remember you were Polish. Every day on their way to the public school they attended, Marie and her best friend Kazia would spit on a hated Russian monument in the square. In 1881, when the Russian czar was killed by a terrorist bomb, she and Kazia danced with joy in their classroom.

The Polish teachers at school followed a secret curriculum to instill national pride in their students. “Botany class” was really Polish history; “German class” was actually Polish literature. Someone would ring a warning bell when a Russian official approached, so the students could swap their forbidden Polish books for Russian ones. Always the star pupil, Marie was often required to recite in front of officials, the very Russians she despised. Having to play along with the charade, unable to show her true feelings, made her angry enough “to scratch like a cat.” But she became good at hiding her emotions when she needed to. Presenting a calm, cool exterior to the outside world was to become a lifelong habit.

At the age of fifteen, Marie was idealistic, with piercing gray eyes, perfect skin, a mass of uncontrollable blonde curls. She was shy and insecure, which she disguised with an attitude of superiority that put off some people. Although she could speak five languages, she never mastered the art of small talk.

Upon graduation, she won the coveted gold medal for best student. She happily presented it to her father, who expected nothing less. Then she took to her bed, struck by another depression.

Alarmed, her father sent her to relatives in the countryside. There she found nourishment in nature—the mountains, rich farmlands, landscapes dotted with castles—as well as in the homes filled with books, music, and art. She had eccentric aunts who smoked cigarettes and wore pants and ran businesses, uncles who were talented violinists. One aunt had gone to a Swiss university; one cousin was a serious student of chemistry. These months were the only time in her life Marie had no cares or responsibilities. For once she relaxed and enjoyed life. She took horse-drawn sleigh rides with people her age, riding from house to house to dance the wild mazurka. One night she danced her red slippers into shreds. She let her brain go on vacation for a year—she rode horses, read “absurd little novels,” drew in her sketchbook. “I can’t believe geometry or algebra ever existed,” she wrote a bit giddily.

She played practical jokes, though even her pranks had the precision of science experiments, changing one variable to test a theory. One relative liked to drink a whole jug of milk with each meal. Marie decided that each day she would thin his milk with more and more water and see if he noticed. Finally he did, to the accompaniment of her hysterical giggles. The same relative was the target of a complicated prank, when she and her cousins turned his too-neat room upside down. On large nails from the ceiling rafters, they hung his bed, chair, table, even his shoes, then hid nearby until he opened the door.

It may seem surprising that a brainiac like Marie would essentially take off her sixteenth year to fool around. But she’d reached the end of the educational road for a girl in Poland at that time. Her brother was going to attend medical school—and any extra funds in the family went to support him. Polish universities were not open to women, no matter how many gold medals they won. One thing the year off allowed her was some space to think about life. She didn’t want to be a parasite; she wanted to contribute to society. Yet how? It was a confusing time. Face-to-face with her very limited options, she still declared, “I, even I, keep a sort of hope that I shall not disappear completely into nothingness.”

Returning to Warsaw, she started work as a teacher. At the same time, she continued her studies by taking part in something secret and highly illegal. A group of Polish women were organizing a free academy. Because the women met in different homes, moving from place to place to avoid detection by Russian police, the school was known as the “Flying University.” Among the eventual thousand or so women in the Flying University, she met others like her, ambitious and eager for education. She began a program of
self
-education, reading widely—science, politics, literature—as well as illustrating fables, writing poetry, working for an underground science magazine.

In the air was a new fervor for science and industry, previously thought too practical for the literature- and philosophy-loving
szlachta
. Like other young people, Marie admired Auguste Comte, a French philosopher who coined the term “positivism.” Positivists believed that scientific and technological advances were the way to improve a society. Intuition and speculation were out. The scientific method was in, using evidence that could be observed, checked, and tested in order to affirm theories. Polish positivism had a special twist—education and hard work would provide the way to rescue Poland. Education, not military might, was the best weapon.

Marie glossed right over Comte’s assertion that women were “naturally inferior.” Instead, she treasured a contemporary novelist, Eliza Orzeszkowa, who wrote that “a woman possesses the same rights as a man . . . to learning and knowledge.”

At seventeen, she still hadn’t narrowed her vision to a particular field. Her interests were broad—literature, sociology, and science. Yet already she was entertaining the thought of a career in biology or medicine . . . or perhaps deciphering the mysteries of the elements by using instruments like the ones locked up in her father’s glass cabinet.

But how could she go about doing that? Who would help her?

CHAPTER TWO

The Pact

M
ARIE ARRIVED AT a solution. A far from perfect one, but the best she could devise under the circumstances. She made a deal with her sister, who craved education as much as she did.

At nineteen, Bronia wanted to be a doctor like their older brother. This was an impossible goal for a girl in Poland. So Marie offered to work and turn her wages over to Bronia, so she could go off and study medicine in the intellectual paradise of Paris. In turn, once Bronia was a doctor, she would bring Marie to Paris and help
her
go to college. The sisters placed total trust in each other. Marie put her own hopes on hold.

Being a governess was respectable work. So immediately, she looked around for the highest-paying governess job she could find. She signed on for a three-year position at an estate sixty miles outside of Warsaw: “Scarcely seventeen, I left my father’s house to begin an independent life. That going away remains one of the most vivid memories of my youth. My heart was heavy as I climbed into the railway car. It was to carry me for several hours, away from those I loved.”

The family who employed her was congenial enough. The father owned a beet-sugar farm and factory. Marie was part servant, part member of the family. She was to teach the family’s two girls, one of whom was her own age. Casimir, the oldest son, was away studying math at Warsaw University.

The most meaningful hours in her day were the ones early in the morning before her official duties began and late at night when she had free time. She prepared herself for college, keeping three books going at once on subjects that intrigued her. It was good training, because she became used to working independently. Her father mailed her advanced problems to solve in algebra or trigonometry. She would turn to them, she said, “When I feel myself quite unable to read with profit.” And her vision of the future became clearer—what she was most passionate about was science.

A chemist in the beet-sugar factory helped out by giving Marie twenty basic chemistry lessons. She took time to learn all the scientific aspects of farming. She also taught local peasant children how to read and write in Polish—an activity for which, if caught, she would have been exiled to Siberia in the barren eastern reaches of Russia.

Romance “absolutely does not enter into my plans,” she wrote. But it did anyway. She fell in love with Casimir when he came home on break from the university. They set about making plans to marry. Suddenly any pretense of treating Marie as an equal was dropped: Casimir’s parents didn’t want him marrying someone who had to work in other people’s houses. Casimir couldn’t stand up to his parents. Even more painfully, for several years he kept Marie hanging, on the hope that perhaps they would marry someday.

Staying on as a governess was both a character-strengthening and hideously awkward experience: “In spite of everything I came through it all honestly with my head high.” But there was a price. Once again she fell into “deep melancholy.” Later Marie wrote a sort of memo to herself: “First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events.”

Returning to Warsaw in 1889, she continued working as a governess and kept sending money to Bronia in Paris. But on Sundays and evenings she secretly attended the “Museum of Industry and Agriculture.” It was in actuality an illegal lab training Polish scientists, directed by one of her cousins.

At the “Museum,” Marie got to work in a real lab for the first time: “I tried out various experiments described in treatises on physics and chemistry, and the results were sometimes unexpected. At times I would be encouraged by a little unhoped-for success, at others I would be in the deepest despair because of accidents and failures resulting from my inexperience.” As slow and frustrating as lab work could be, it was also exhilarating, a rush.