Read Online Marie Curie by Kathleen Krull - Free Book Online

friends. One was physicist Paul Langevin, a former star student of Pierre’s. Einstein once said that if he hadn’t already come up with the special theory of relativity, Langevin would have. Marie admired his “wonderful intelligence” . . . and perhaps also his stylish handlebar mustache. He was five years her junior and currently working with electron theory and magnetism.
    He was also a married man with four children, though his marriage had long been an unhappy one. He and Marie fell in love, attended conferences together, and eventually rented a small apartment near the Sorbonne as a secret meeting place. She would leave the lab at noon, go grocery-shopping, have lunch with him at the apartment. They exchanged mushy letters: “I am so impatient to see you” . . . “I embrace you with all my tenderness.” In one she offered a list of suggestions for extricating himself from his marriage, so precise they read like a science experiment. To her, Langevin was a second chance at happiness with a protégé of Pierre’s, a scientific peer; she even envisioned having more children.
    Emboldened on all fronts, she allowed colleagues to nominate her for membership in the all-male Academy of Sciences, the most powerful science organization in France. After all, she was already a member of equivalent academies in Poland, Holland, Sweden, the United States, and Russia. Still, “science is useless to women,” raved a French woman writer in one newspaper. Marie’s ambition was just too masculine. In 1911, the academy rejected her—by a single vote. She would never have anything to do with it or its publications again.
    Meanwhile, Langevin’s wife began making death threats against Marie. In a position to know, Langevin warned Marie to take them seriously; some of her friends were concerned for her safety.
    Later in 1911, Marie received two telegrams at almost the same time. Good news and bad news. One telegram informed her that she had just won her second Nobel Prize, this time for Chemistry. It was for essentially the same work as her first Nobel, for Physics, but the Swedish Academy decided that isolating pure radium—which she had done through chemical processes—was “much greater than the discovery of other elements.”
    Quite a triumph, but the other piece of news was devastating. Those mushy love letters? They’d been leaked to the press. Months earlier, Langevin’s wife had hired a detective who managed to steal the letters from Paul’s desk at the apartment.
    Once the romance hit the newspapers, the scandal was the talk of Paris. Then as now, papers were eager to exploit drama to make money, not only reporting gossip but also fabricating stories. The tabloids throbbed with lurid rumors—was Pierre’s death really an accident?
    All blame fell squarely on Marie, a double standard hard at work. Married men’s affairs were often no secret and tolerated by their wives, while a woman’s adultery was by law a crime. Marie was a home-wrecker, no longer a “French heroine” but once again a “dirty foreigner” destroying a proper French family. Those who disapproved of a successful woman in a powerful position—one now without a husband to make her more conventionally “acceptable”—railed against her. Some Sorbonne professors demanded that she get out of France. Anti-Semitic writers claimed that she was Jewish.
    To some, her behavior was somehow treasonous, a symbol of France’s decline. With rivalries among European countries escalating in the pre-World War I years, national pride was a serious issue. The scandal played into France’s insecurities that foreign countries were overtaking them.
    One newspaper editor published such trashy articles that Langevin challenged him to a duel. Armed with loaded pistols, they met in a park. But at the critical moment, neither could bring himself to fire. All was silence except for the murmuring of pigeons. Langevin said later, “I am not an assassin,” while