The Age of Radiance (4 page)

The cruelty arrived when firstborn son Kazimierz (Casimir), studying mathematics and agricultural engineering at Warsaw University, returned home for the holidays. He quickly fell in love with the nineteen-year-old Manya, and she fell back, tail over teacup. In time, he told his parents they wanted to get married, and the young couple expected a happy consent. Everyone adored Manya. But, they were wrong. The parents believed their brilliant son was destined to marry above, not below, his station and forbade an engagement with this penniless nobody. Casimir agreed to his parents’ wishes, which made him seem weak to Manya, but she still loved him, and she couldn’t afford to quit a job that paid so well.

Then, for a number of years, Casimir wavered, telling Manya he loved her and had to have her as his bride and, alternately, that he had to accede to his parents’ wishes. She wrote Henrietta on April 4, 1887,
“If [men] don’t want to marry impecunious young girls, let them go to the devil! Nobody is asking them anything. But why do they offend by troubling the peace of an innocent creature?” On November 25, 1888:
“I have fallen into black melancholy. . . . My existence strangely resembles that of one of those slugs which haunt the dirty water of our river. . . . I was barely 18 when I came here, and what I have not been through! . . . I feel everything very violently, with a physical violence, and then I give myself a shaking, the vigor of my nature conquers, and it seems to me that I’m coming out of my nightmare. . . . First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events.”

The tormented young woman tried drowning herself in her studies, reading ferociously after dinner every night—sociology, literature, history, even an advanced math course she completed, by mail, with help from her father. Repeatedly her interests and her talents were sparked by physics and chemistry, so much so that she convinced one of the factory chemists to give her lessons. Then the Zorawskis learned that Casimir and Manya were still illicitly seeing each other. She was fired. Completely heartbroken, Manya returned to Warsaw, lived with her father, worked at a few more governess jobs, and, through her cousin Joseph, got laboratory experience at the clandestine
Museum of Industry and Agriculture, where Joseph illegally educated a generation of Polish scientists.

Then in March 1890, Manya received a letter from Bronya. The elder sister announced she was engaged to a very different Casimir—a man who would be deported to Siberia if he ever returned to the Russian empire, as he was believed to be one of the conspirators behind Czar Alexander II’s assassination—and that her studies were complete. Now it was Manya’s turn, and Bronya invited her littlest sister to come to Paris to live with the new couple and be supported financially, as promised so long ago. But now, Manya wavered, for she was still so much in love. Finally in the fall of 1891, Casimir Zorawski wrote to say that their relationship was categorically finished. Manya left Poland, for Paris.

But this is not the end of that story. After growing up to become a well-regarded mathematician in Poland, the adult Casimir Zorawski would frequently be seen gazing up at Warsaw’s monumental statue of the nation’s great heroine, Marie Curie, the “penniless nobody” he had lost forever.

B
orn November 7, 1867, in the province of Vistula Land, a Poland brutally ruled by a vengeful Moscow, Marja Skłodowska was the baby of her family and like all Polish husbands, wives, pets, children, and cherished possessions, she and her brothers and sisters all had nicknames. Zofia was Zosia; Bronisława, Bronya; Helen, Hela; Joseph, Jozio; and the youngest, Marja, went by Manya, Manyusya, and Anciupeccio. The birth of her fifth and last child led mother Bronya to resign her position as head of a Warsaw school, where the family had resided in complimentary housing; she now worked from home, as a cobbler. Then, she became ill, the beginnings of a family cataclysm. Bronya had been taking care of her husband’s younger brother, sickened with tuberculosis. The brother passed, and soon enough Bronya herself was infected, having likely contracted the disease from her good intentions.

Three years before Manya’s birth, Polish nationalists waged revolutionary assaults against the Russian colonial authorities and were defeated. Tens of thousands were interned in Siberian slave-labor camps; hundreds of thousands fled to live in exile, and the rulers began a program of “Russification.” Manya’s daughter, Eve:
“For the children, the dreadful nature of Czarist occupation was in the Russian-appointed head of the gymnasium, Ivanov. They were taught that Poland was a province and their language a dialect, and forced to recite their Catholic prayers in Russian.” Manya:
“Constantly held in suspicion and spied upon, the children knew that a single conversation in Polish, or an imprudent word, might seriously harm, not only themselves, but also their families.”

Manya’s grandparents had been comfortably well-to-do, and the furniture in the family’s study revealed this prosperous ancestry: a desk of French mahogany, Restoration armchairs in red velvet, a green malachite clock, a table inlaid with a marble checkerboard; the portrait of a bishop; and a collection of scientific apparatuses, including an oak-mounted barometer and a gold-leaf electroscope. But Manya’s parents’ sympathies with the Polish liberation movement destroyed their earnings as a state-employed teacher and school administrator, and that combined with poor investments erased their inheritance.

Eve described what happened next:
“While his wife was being treated on the Riviera in Nice, his brother-in-law had lost 30,000 rubles of the family’s money in a steam mill; the father was forced to take in boarders. The proper family was unraveled into chaos and cacophony; Manya had to study with her thumbs in her ears. But she became so absorbed in whatever she turned her mind to that the family made a joke of making a tremendous noise around her and watching as she continued to read and pay them no attentions.” The girl would have this power of concentration for the rest of her life, as Manya herself said,
“Weak as I am, in order not to let my mind fly away on every wind that blows, yielding to the slightest breath it encounters, it would be necessary either to have everything motionless around me, or else, speeding on like a humming top, in movement itself to be rendered impervious to external things. . . . One must make of life a dream, and of that dream a reality.”

Mother Bronya then returned from Nice, her condition unimproved. Eve:
“One of the boarders infected Bronya and Zosia with typhus, killing the elder sister. Their mother, too weak to leave the house, watched from the windows as the cortege took her first born away forever.” Manya was eight when her beautiful sister Zosia died, but this was not the end of the family’s sorrow. The children prayed every night for their mother’s health to be restored, but on May 9, 1878, she died as well. Manya was ten, and “would often sit in some corner and cry bitterly. Her tears could not be stopped by anybody,” sister Hela said, while Manya remembered,
“For many years we all felt weighing on us the loss of the one who had been the soul of the house.” The family was forced to sell their country home, but at least some of their friends and relatives still had estates, where they were invited to spend the summers, tramping the woods for mushrooms and whortleberries, playing dress-up
as traditional peasants, riding horse-drawn sleighs, and waltzing at night to fiddlers on the lawn. Manya:
“We sleep sometimes at night and sometimes by day, we dance, and we run to such follies that sometimes we deserve to be locked up in an asylum for the insane.”

T
raveling as economically as possible, Manya Skłodowska left Warsaw for Paris carrying not only enough food and reading for the trip, but also a folding chair and a blanket, as German fourth-class travel did not include seats. She then joined Bronya and her husband at their apartment on the rue d’Allemagne at the city’s edge in smelling distance of la Villette, the abattoir. Twice a day the small, young foreign woman climbed the spiral staircase of a horse-drawn double-decker omnibus for the hour-long commute to and from the Sorbonne. The top section, open to the elements and known as the imperial, held the cheapest seats, with the best views. It was impossible, but she was in Paris, taking classes at the finest university in all of continental Europe. She filled out her registration card not as Marja or Manya, but as Marie Skłodowska, half-French, and half-foreign, with a surname no one but a Pole could pronounce—regardless, everyone who knew her forever called her Manya. Marie’s educational background and laboratory experience were dramatically scantier than that of her fellow classmates, and she struggled to keep up with schooling and with the mysteries of the French tongue. Stubborn, shy, dressed in the gray-wool-and-pomegranate-linen dress of a poor immigrant scraping through life, Marie was nevertheless a striking woman, with ash-blond hair and porcelain complexion. She was so pretty that one of her friends told a group of boys to leave them alone or risk a beating from her
parapluie
.

Bronya and Casimir turned their apartment into
petite Pologne
, with every night a gathering of homesick Varsovians in exile, enjoying wine, cake, vodka, tea, and a piano player by the name of Ignaz Paderewski, all in heated conversation over science and politics—two future presidents of Poland were among the regulars. It was a glorious reminder of home, and it was also too much of a distraction for an overburdened university student. After six months, Marie moved into a sixth-floor
chambre de bonne
—a one-room garret—at 3 rue Flatters off boulevard de Port-Royal in the
quartier latin
, paying twenty-five francs a month, with no hot water as she couldn’t afford heat. Sometimes, she fainted from hunger. Her first real adult home had a folding iron bed, a white wooden table, a big brown trunk (which could be sat on in an emergency), an oil lamp, a stove, an alcohol-fed oven, a washing tub, one
fork, one knife, one spoon, one cup, one cooking pan, two plates, and one teakettle with three glasses for herself and her only guests, the relatives. She knew how to sew, but never made herself any clothes, only repairing her Polish outfits again and again. On nights when it was too cold to sleep, she put everything she owned—clothes, coats, towels—on top of her coverlet, then put the single chair on top of all of it to weigh everything down and perhaps give at least the illusion of warmth.
“My situation was not exceptional; it was the familiar experience of many of the Polish students whom I knew,” she wrote later. “I carried the little coal I used up six flights. . . . I prepared my meals with the aid of an alcohol lamp. . . . It gave me a precious sense of liberty and independence. . . . [This was] one of the best memories of my life.”

After all her troubles as a university student, undereducated because she was a woman and foreign-born, Marie finished first in her master’s-degree physics course in the summer of 1893 and second in math the following year. Then a miraculous stroke of luck came her way: the same friend who’d defended her on the streets with an umbrella got her awarded the Alexandrovitch scholarship—six hundred rubles—enough for over a year of living expenses. She was saved. The following year, she was awarded her master’s in mathematics, and by then, she spoke perfect French with a bare whisper of Polish flavor. In a few years’ time, she would have her first paid assignment, and out of those fees she would repay, for the first time in its history, the scholarship, so another impoverished student could be given help when it was most needed.

Before completing the math degree, she was commissioned by the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry to do a study aligning the magnetic properties of different steels to their chemical compositions. She needed to find a lab where she could do this work, and a friend she’d met while working for the Zorawskis knew someone who might have a room, a teacher at the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville (the city’s industrial engineering and chemistry school). Additionally, this friend of a friend of a friend had a number of remarkable similarities to Marie. She was investigating the magnetic properties of steel, and this city schoolteacher had discovered a remarkable interaction of heat and magnetism; Marie was educated outside any state system through the Floating University and her program of self-education while working as a governess, while Pierre had been homeschooled by his parents, his brother, and a tutor before qualifying to enter the Sorbonne. They were both workaholics, with his family nearly as well educated and as financially precarious as the Skłodowskas. And they were both outsiders in the French scientific community,
who expected their members to have a Polytechnique education like the Becquerels.