The Age of Radiance (10 page)

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. Everyone 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.

A
s 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:

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.” Irène: “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.

Though increasingly ill from radiation poisoning, Marie lived long enough to see her children then make the great discovery of their careers in 1934. At the time, Fred had become taken with his newest apparatus, a Wilson cloud chamber, a magnificent little vitrine housing a dense fog of supersaturated vapor that revealed the movements of particles as trails in the mist. Alpha and beta particles produced distinctive vapor shapes, as did electrons.
“An infinitely tiny particle projected in this enclosed region can trace its own path thanks to the succession of drops of condensation. Isn’t it the most beautiful experiment in the world?” Fred wrote to a colleague.

On January 15, 1934, the Joliot-Curies tried striking the light end of the periodic table with polonium emissions in their cloud chamber. Something strange happened; when elements such as aluminum and boron were bombarded, they continued to exude rays after the bombardment stopped.
Aluminum would stay radioactive for three minutes all on its own. Was it trapping some of the alphas, shooting out a neutron, and alchemizing into a radioactive isotope?

After bombarding aluminum and then boron with alpha particles, chemistry revealed isotopes of radioactive phosphorus in the first and radioactive nitrogen in the second—the first time human beings had created radioactivity. Fred
“began to run and jump around in that vast basement.” “With the neutron we were too late. With the positron we were too late. Now we are in time,” he joyously told a student.

Fred Joliot: “I will never forget the expression of intense joy which overtook [Mé’s] face when Irène and I showed her the first [man-made] radioactive element in a little glass tube. I can see her still taking this little tube of the radioelement, already quite weak, in her radium-damaged fingers. To verify what we were telling her, she brought the Geiger-Muller counter up close to it and she could hear the numerous clicks. . . . This was without a doubt the last great satisfaction of her life.” Marie told Irène that this achievement meant “we have returned to the glorious days of the old laboratory!”