The Age of Radiance (9 page)

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 brilliant
scientist 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 Langevin, Einstein was equally fulsome:
“In his scientific thinking Langevin possessed an extraordinary vivacity and clarity . . . it seems to be certain that he would have developed the special theory of relativity if it had not been done elsewhere.”

Paul was brilliant, passionate about science, and good-looking. It was a wonderful match for the brokenhearted widow, but Langevin was also married, to Emma Jeanne Desfosses, a harridan who never tired of warmongering in the name of love. In their first year of marital unbliss, Desfosses’s mother and sister took letters from the newlywed husband’s pockets that described his troubled marriage so that Jeanne would have evidence in case of divorce. The following year, he appeared at the lab covered in bruises—during a fracas, the three women had thrown an iron chair at him. But M. Langevin was no bystander in this eternal drama, for when Jeanne stormed out after one fight and threatened to end the marriage, Paul begged her to return . . . a scenario that would be repeated endlessly over the years to come. Sorbonne physicist Jean Perrin and his wife, Henriette, were close with both the Curies and the Langevins, and after one violent spat Henriette recounted,
“Often, during meals, M. Langevin, cruelly wounded by the words of his wife, left the table. The meal continued. . . . I was very sad to see the unhappiness of a friend that I liked with all my heart. . . . He said to me, ‘I don’t know who I can lean on. I have only my children and they are very small.’ ”

In the spring of 1910, Marie, having heard Jeanne’s tales of how her husband woefully mistreated her, criticized Paul to his face for his vile behavior. Langevin replied that she only knew half of the story; that in fact just the other day, Jeanne had cracked a bottle on his head. Paul now found someone to lean on, regularly confiding in Marie about his terrible domestic conundrum—then suddenly, everything between them changed. Marie wrote,
“I spent last evening and night thinking of you and the hours we had together. I hold the delicious memory. Still I see your eyes, kind and tender, and your warm smile and I can only dream of the moment that I find again the sweetness of your presence.” He replied, “I am trembling with impatience at the thought of seeing you return at last, and of telling you how much I missed you. I kiss you tenderly awaiting tomorrow.”

On July 15, 1910, Paul and Marie secretly rented an apartment together, at 5 rue du Banquier. They called it
chez nous
. Almost immediately, one of Jeanne’s servants fished a love letter from Paul to Marie out of the postal box and gave it to the wife. During their next brawl, she warned him,
“You are going to see quite a scandal in the newspapers,” and asked their son, eleven years old, if he wanted to grow up to be like his father and cheat on his wife with a mistress. Marie told the Perrins that her and Paul’s “great friendship angered Mme. Langevin [and] that she had declared to her husband that she was going to get rid of this obstacle.” Paul explained to his lover, “That means that she would kill you.” Marie: “As long as I know you are near her my nights are atrocious. I cannot sleep. With the greatest difficulty I fall asleep at two or three o’clock and awake with the sensation of fever. I cannot even work. . . . I must be attached to you by very strong cords to make up my mind to preserve these cords at the risk of my position and my life.”

The following week, Jean Perrin “was astounded to see Mme. Curie run to me as I was entering the house. She had been waiting for me for several hours. . . . She said that she had been insulted in the street in crude terms by Mme. Langevin and by her sister, Mme. Bourgeois, and that this woman had threatened her [and demanded that Marie] leave France. . . . I think I will never forget the emotion I felt seeing the distress to which this illustrious woman had been reduced . . . wandering like a beast being tracked.” The next day, Perrin went to try to talk some sense into Jeanne, but she “shouted threats for everyone to hear, that if Mme. Curie didn’t leave in eight days she would kill her.”

Perrin arranged for a meeting of Jeanne, Paul, and Jeanne’s brother-in-law, Henri Bourgeois, an editor at
Le Petit Journal
. They agreed that, in exchange for Paul’s no longer seeing Marie either personally or professionally,
Jeanne would end her campaign. However, that the terminally aggrieved wife had a journalist for a relative and an ally remained a serious threat, for in belle epoque Paris, the tabloids had a loud public voice. Historian Barbara Tuchman:
“Variegated, virulent, turbulent, literary, inventive, personal, conscienceless and often vicious, the daily newspapers of Paris were the liveliest and the most important elements in public life [and] represented every conceivable shade of opinion, calling themselves Republican, Conservative, Catholic, Socialist, Nationalist, Bonapartist, Legitimist, Independent, Absolutely Independent, Conservative Catholic, Conservative Monarchist, Republican Liberal, Republican Socialist, Republican Independent, Republican Progressivist, Republican Radical Socialist. Some were morning, some were evening, some had illustrated supplements. At four to six pages, they covered, besides the usual political and foreign affairs, news of the
haut monde
, of
le turf
, of fashion, of theater and opera, concerts and art, the salons and the Academy. . . . The press was daily wine, meat and bread to Paris. Major careers and a thousand minor ones were made in journalism. Everyone from Academicians to starving Anarchists made a supplementary living from it.” Additionally, in this society at this time, married men were assumed to squire mistresses. But those mistresses were supposed to be socially invisible, not the most famous Frenchwoman in the world.

After returning from the International Congress of Radiology and Electricity in September of 1910—underwritten by sodium carbonate magnate Ernest Solvay and attended in Brussels by Albert Einstein, quantum discoverer Max Planck, Marie’s neighbor Jean Perrin, as well as Paul Langevin—Marie vacationed with her children at L’Arcouëst on the Breton coast, a spot so overrun with Sorbonne professors it was nicknamed Port Science. There, she wrote Paul an echo of what Pierre had written to her so many years before:
“I spent yesterday evening and night thinking of you, of the hours that we have spent together and of which I have kept a delicious memory. I still see your good and tender eyes, your charming smile, and I think only of the moment when I will find again all the sweetness of your presence. . . . It would be so good to gain the freedom to see each other as much as our various occupations permit, to work together, to walk or to travel together. . . . What couldn’t come out of this feeling, instinctive and so spontaneous and so compatible with our intellectual needs, to which it seems so admirably adapted? I believe that we could derive everything from it: good work in common, a good solid friendship, courage for life and even beautiful children of love in the most beautiful meaning of the word.” They renewed their affair and returned to
chez nous
.

On October 31, 1910, one of the Immortals, chemist Désiré Gernez, died, meaning an Académie Française chair was in contention. Marie was the only French laureate who was not a member, even though she had been elected to equivalent organizations in Sweden, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Poland, the United States, and Russia. If she won, she’d be the first woman in the Institut de France’s 215-year history; her competition was Édouard Branly, inventor of the wireless coherer, an element of the telegraph. The French tabloids turned the contest into breathless headlines, with French nationalists and the Catholic Church supporting Branly. At the January 4, 1911, meeting, the vote to admit women as academy members failed, 85 to 60, upholding “immutable tradition.” During the ensuing science-branch vote, astronomer Henri Deslandres explained how it was so
“very difficult to judge the works of Mme. Curie and to separate her research from the inspired work of M. Curie.” Branly won, and for the next eleven years, Curie’s research could not be published in the most globally read French science journal,
Comptes rendus
.

In the spring of 1911, Paul and Marie opened the door of
chez nous
to discover that someone had broken in and stolen their love letters. Tabloid editor/brother-in-law Henri Bourgeois informed Marie that Jeanne had hired the thief, and that he would now use the letters to scandalize the world and destroy Curie’s reputation. Jean Perrin advised Marie to leave town until things calmed down, and she did, attending a scientific conference in Genoa where she poured out her troubles to another attendee, Sorbonne science dean Paul Appell’s daughter, Marguerite Borel, who recalled
“under the austere scientist, the tender and lively woman, capable of walking through fire for those she loves.”

On November 4,
Le Journal
’s front page heralded, “A Story of Love: Madame Curie and Professor Langevin. . . . The fires of radium which beam so mysteriously . . . have just lit a fire in the heart of one of the scientists who studies their action so devotedly; and the wife and the children of this scientist are in tears.” The following day, Bourgeois’s paper,
Le Petit Journal
, also had a front-page report, and the two papers began to duel over plots and sources. The Curie-Langevin affair became known as “the greatest sensation in Paris since the theft of the
Mona Lisa
.”

Three days later, Reuters announced that the first woman laureate now would be the first man or woman to have two Nobels. The 1903 award had been in physics, for the discovery of radioactivity; now she would receive the 1911 chemistry prize for discovering radium and plutonium. But when the Scandinavians learned of the French hubbub, there was an effort to disinvite
her, with laureate Svante Arrhenius writing Marie, “I beg you to stay in France; no one can calculate what might happen here.” Albert Einstein told her, “I am convinced that you [should] continue to hold this riffraff in contempt. . . . If the rabble continues to be occupied with you, simply stop reading that drivel. Leave it to the vipers it was fabricated for.”

To end the war of love, Jeanne demanded full custody of the four children and a thousand francs in monthly support. Paul refused. She went to court, charging him with
“consorting with a concubine in the marital dwelling,” including as evidence the stolen love letters. On November 23, alongside ten pages of the Curie-Langevin epistles,
L’Oeuvre
explained that since Marie was Polish, this affair proved “France in the grip of the bunch of dirty foreigners, who pillage it, soil it and dishonor it.”