Read Online Marie Curie by Kathleen Krull - Free Book Online Page A

the editor claimed having last-minute “scruples about depriving French science of a precious brain.”
    The furor was excruciating for someone so private she dreaded publicity even when it was flattering. Einstein urged Marie to “simply stop reading that drivel,” though behind her back he told a friend, “She is not attractive enough to become dangerous for anyone.”
    Marie tried to fight back. She issued one statement after another, never exactly denying the affair, but objecting to the invasion of her private life: “There is nothing in my acts which obliges me to feel diminished,” she insisted. She threatened to sue newspapers, promising to demand “considerable sums which will be used in the interest of science.”
    But when her house became a tourist attraction, with disapproving Parisians throwing stones at her windows, she finally took her children and left town. Her life in science had to stop for the time being. She grieved at being forced to interrupt her current project in the lab, working with a dutch physicist to study radiation from radium at very low temperatures.
    Marie was crushed. She continued to stand by Langevin and remain cordial—one friend noted that she was “capable of walking through fire for those she loves”—but it was absolutely unthinkable that they keep seeing each other.
    Worst of all, the Nobel Committee tactlessly wrote to ask her to please not come to Sweden to accept her prize. In fact, the committee members implied they wouldn’t have bestowed it had they known about the love letters. She stood up for herself, indignantly firing a letter back: “I believe there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of my private life.” And off she went to Stockholm to pick up her prize, taking Bronia and Irène for company.
    Her dignified speech was not shy about claiming full credit for her accomplishments. Radioactivity “is an infant that I saw being born, and I have contributed to raising it with all my strength. The child has grown; it has become beautiful.” She talked about “the chemistry of the imponderable,” that scientists were no longer working just with materials they could observe with the naked eye.
    But once back in Paris, she was rushed to the hospital, suffering from a kidney ailment as well as the most severe depression of her life. Her weight dropped from 123 to 103 pounds. She had to leave her daughters in the care of family members and governesses. Fearing she was on her deathbed, she wrote seven pages of instructions for the distribution of all the radium in her possession.
    She was not to see Ève and Irène for almost a year. For a while, Marie recuperated at the home of an old friend in England. Hertha Ayrton was a scientist (studying, among other things, sand ripples), a nurse, and a militant supporter of women’s right to vote. Ayrton had nursed back to health other suffragettes who had carried out hunger strikes in prison; now she applied her ministrations to Marie.
    Marie did return home. However, for almost two years, illness hindered her career. She had managed to attend the first Solvay Conference in 1911, sponsored by Ernest Solvay, a wealthy Belgian chemist. He gathered the top twenty-one physicists around the world to discuss the new concepts of Einstein and the German physicist Max Planck. Marie contributed to the lively discussion but made no presentations and left early.
    The following year, she was too sick to attend the Solvay Conference. Its ongoing project was to finalize a standard measurement for the amount of radioactivity found in anything. A “standard” sample of radium was needed. From her sickbed, Marie made it known that she would help the project but only on her own terms. For instance, she wanted the standard piece of radium to be kept at her lab. She had discovered the element, after all.
    Rutherford was brought in to mediate, and although he referred to her as “a rather difficult person to deal