This is the second biography of a scientist I’ve read, this one written by a family member – Marie Curie’s daughter, who, incidentally, died at the age of 102 while I was reading this book. The close relationship between subject and author had all sorts of implications. Most noticeably, this is probably the most thorough and personal book about the double Nobel laureate anyone was ever likely to write.
Eve Curie, born when her mother was 37 and her father was to live only 16 more months, naturally mentions the scientific achievements of Madame Curie, and goes into great detail on her attitude to work, but the physiochemical ins and outs of the discovery of polonium and radium (or any other of Marie Curie’s works) are largely glossed over. Since I am not well versed in physics or mathematics this suited me fine and from the start I was taken captive by the life of the Polish student who adores her family and her country but is unable to pass the opportunity of studies in France.
I became engrossed as in a novel, waiting excitedly for the chapter entitled “Pierre Curie”, where the serious and hard-working heroine meets the love of her life. The love story between her parents is described tenderly by Curie and if not textbook romantic, it is certainly fulfilling and extraordinary.
It is odd and possibly intentional how the biography progresses when Pierre Curie dies in a traffic accident. Up to this point, Marie’s life was recounted chronologically and in minute detail, while afterwards her years blend into each other. Moods and events in the physicist’s life are described in a seemingly arbitrary order and her sorrow of having lost her husband is palpable.
Coincidentally I was reading this book while in Paris and found myself on an accidental secular pilgrimage: depressed at the street corner where Pierre died, enjoying the view in the street where Marie spent the last years of her life, and even unexpectedly found that their bodies had since been moved to the Panthéon, the resting place of the people France is most proud of.
Eve Curie’s arcane writing style (the book was first published in 1937) throughout evokes the admiration for her famous mother, without euphemising her flaws. Madame Curie is portrayed as a highly intelligent and motivated woman with no great natural skills for housework or personal friendships and no time for leisure. She raised her daughters sometimes controversially (the elder, Irène, also won a Nobel prize later, so her methods can’t have been all wrong) and scorned all publicity and anything that would distract her from science. Her religious views changed from Catholic, raised by a pious mother, to the view expressed in the following excerpt from a letter to her cousin.
“Let everybody keep his own faith, so long as it is sincere. [...] I respect sincere religious feelings when I meet them, even if they go with a limited state of mind.”
In fact, the many examples of Marie’s writing, her direct quotes and letters addressed to her, are among the highlights of the book. As a young woman she writes down the beautiful headstrong motto: “First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events”. At the height of her undesired fame she points out to a journalist how “In science we must be interested in things, not in persons”, and this seems to sum up her character well.
Unusual events from Marie Curie’s life that I had never heard of include her friendship with the royal Belgian couple and her creation of an X-ray lab on wheels servicing military hospitals during the first World War.
Despite this intimate book, Madame Curie remains alien to me, she is unlike anyone I have met in real life. But maybe therein lay the appeal, for me and all those she inspired during her lifetime.
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