Free The Age of Radiance by Craig Nelson Page B

rue du Chemin de Fer, in Sceaux, close by her husband’s tomb. When Dr. Curie died in 1910, she had Pierre disinterred, putting her father-in-law’s coffin first, then Pierre, with room for her on top.
    Marie Curie never forgave France for what she considered its rude treatment of her husband in failing to give him either the honors or the laboratory facilities he merited. Following his lead, she, too, refused the Legion of Honor and devoted the rest of her life to erecting a laboratory in Paris worthy of Pierre’s memory. In 1909, the Pasteur Institute offered to build a Curie lab, but this would have meant Marie’s resignation from the Sorbonne. Suddenly the university rose to action, collaborating with the Pasteur to build the Radium Institute, with one lab for Marie, and another for Claude Regaud, who researched to perfect curietherapy.
    Its street was named rue Pierre Curie.
    Four years after the accident that took Pierre’s life, in the spring of 1910, Marguerite Borel, the novelist daughter of Sorbonne chair Paul Appell, commented,“Everybody said Marie Curie is dead to the world. She is a scientist walled in behind her grief.” But, after years of widowhood, Marie began to resurrect. She stopped wearing all black and physically appeared to regain decades of youth.
    The secret was as old as time, and Paris. She was in love.

    F or a century after first becoming famous, the public would hold of Marie Curie an image of a brain without a heart; a scientist, but not a wife or mother; a hero of women’s rights as iconic as George Washington . . . and as a figurehead, just as lacking in humanity. Even though her greatest work was achieved when she was in her thirties, she is remembered as an asexual, emotionless old woman . . . but there are clear reasons for these misperceptions. At the height of her fame, a journalist asked for details of her childhood, of her psychology, of her emotions, and Mme. Curie refused, explaining,“In science we must be interested in things, not in persons.” She told another reporter,“There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.” Albert Einstein wrote,“Madame Curie is very intelligent but has the soul of a herring, which means that she is poor when it comes to the art of joy and pain.” Additionally, though he admired her immensely, her main method of expressing emotion, he said, was in griping. But a great reason for Marie Curie’s denuded public reputation was that her Mourning Journal was unknown for decades, as was her heartbreaking love affair with Pierre’s student Paul Langevin, a wildly handsome and extravagantly brilliantscientist famous for his magnetic theories, his quartz oscillators, and his termagant of a wife.
    Their very public affair caused such a scandal that the Curie descendants would suppress its details for the next forty years.
    Paul Langevin first met the Curies as a seventeen-year-old municipal school student under teacher Pierre in 1888 and was, in effect, a protégé of both husband and wife. When Pierre left for the Sorbonne in 1904, Paul was hired to replace him at the city school; he taught alongside Marie at Sèvres, and when she replaced Pierre at the Sorbonne in 1906, he was given her post. Paul said, at Pierre’s funeral,“The hour when we knew we could meet him, when he loved to talk about his science, the walk that we often took with him, these bring back his memory day after day, evoke his kindly and pensive face, his luminous eyes, his beautifully expressive head, shaped by twenty-five years spent in the laboratory, by a life of unrelenting work, of complete simplicity, at once thoughtful and industrious, by his continual concern with moral beauty, by an elegance of mind which produced in him the habit of believing nothing, of doing nothing, of saying nothing, of accepting nothing, in his thought or in his actions which was not perfectly clear and which he did not entirely understand.” Of