The Radium Woman

A Youth Edition of the Life of Madame Curie

Eleanor Doorly

• Publisher: Brilliant Women - Read & Co.
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781406706130, 9781443721486
• eBook ISBN: 9781528760089
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

An engaging biography of Madame Curie's life written for younger readers, The Radium Woman by Eleanor Doorly chronicles the life and work of one of science's brilliant women. Detailing all aspects of her years, from early childhood to winning a Nobel prize, this charming edition for children brings the story of Madame Curie vividly to life.

Adapted from the 1937 biography written by Marie Curie's daughter Ève, this classic children's edition begins with a five-year-old Manya Sklodovski (Marie Curie's birth name) living in occupied Poland. The first chapters follow Manya and her daily difficulties growing up in Warsaw under Russian occupation.

The richly detailed biography then recounts her life as she grows, her studies in Belgium and Paris, and later becoming a teacher, to meeting her future husband, Pierre Curie. It narrates her successful scientific career and the great discoveries that changed the face of science and earned her the Nobel prize in 1903.

First published in 1939, this edition by Brilliant Women - Read & Co. also includes the essay 'The Discovery of Radium' by Madame Curie. The Radium Woman is a perfect read for young people who are interested in the life and work of Madame Curie and want to learn more about the trailblazing women of the past.

CHAPTER VIII

“I take the Sun and throw it . . .”

“I TAKE the Sun and throw it . . . Manya laughed with joy at the words. Where was she? In the heart of Paris where joyous, free things happened, where in lightness of heart her great teacher, Paul Appell, could teach what he pleased, how he pleased; and, if he taught truth, crowds would flock to his teaching.

Manya had arrived early for the lecture and chosen a front seat in the great amphitheatre of the Sorbonne. She put her notebooks and her penholder neatly on the desk in front of her. All around her was the noise of the crowd getting into their places, but Manya did not hear them; she was absorbed in thought. Suddenly there was silence, for the master had come in and, as all his students were ardent mathematicians, they expected a treat.

Appell, with his square head, in his dark severe gown, explained so clearly that the very stars seemed to move obediently into their places as he spoke and the earth seemed at his mercy. He adventured boldly into the furthest regions of space, he juggled with figures and with stars. He said perfectly naturally and fitting the action to the word: “I take the Sun and throw it. . . .”

Manya was happy. How could anyone find science dull? She thought how exquisite were the unchanging laws of the universe and how still more wonderful it was that the human mind could understand them. Was not Science stranger than a fairy tale, more delicious that a book of adventure? It was worth years of suffering she felt just to hear that phrase uttered by a savant: “I take the Sun and throw it. . . .”

But how much else Manya had found in Paris! When she had first jumped from the train in the smoky, noisy North Station, she had thrown back her shoulders and breathed deep, not noticing the smoke. For the first time she was breathing the air of a free land. Outside the station everything seemed to her a miracle. The children in the gutter teased one another in the tongue they wanted to speak; what a miracle for the Polish girl who had had to speak Russian! The book shops sold the books they wanted to sell, the books of all the world; what a miracle!

But most miraculous of all, that road where she jumped on her first omnibus and scrambled to the cheap seats on top, was taking her, Manya Sklodovska, to a university that opened its doors to women! And what a university! The Sorbonne was the most famous university in the world. Even Luther, the German, had confessed that Paris had the most famous school in the whole world. The university was being rebuilt; workmen were everywhere; dust and noise were everywhere; classes moved from room to room as the workmen took possession. But that mattered nothing to Manya. At last she could learn what she wanted.

From that time on, she began to write her Christian name in French—Marie. With her surname she could do nothing. Her young associates found it too difficult to pronounce and a little on account of it left her alone. In the long corridors they turned to glance back at the simply, poorly-dressed stranger with the airy, fairy hair and intense eyes. “Who is she?” asked one. “A foreigner with an impossible name,” answered another. “They say she is always among the first in Physics, but she doesn’t talk.”

Marie had to work very hard. She had had no idea how ignorant she would find herself in comparison with her companions. Her French turned out not to be as useful as she had expected. She missed whole phrases in a lecture. She found great chasms in her mathematics and physics. She set to work to correct all her defects.

It was well for her that in those first days she lived with Bronia and Casimir. Bronia was a genius for making things comfortable. She had taken a flat outside Paris where flats were cheaper and had furnished it with borrowed money. She was not the sort of person who lived just anyhow for fear of the risk of not being able to pay back. She had to have pretty things in her home, nicely draped curtains, graceful furniture, a piano and a few bright flowers in a vase. In her little kitchen she cooked exquisitely well-flavoured dishes and cakes, or made tea with tea sent especially from Poland, because she felt that there were some things Paris could not produce.

The quarter where she lived was, as in medieval times, almost reserved for butchers, and Doctor Dluski’s patients were mostly sick butchers. They interviewed him in the little study which was set apart for his use during certain hours of the day. At other times it was Bronia’s consulting room where she saw the butcher’s wives about their babies. In the evenings work was strictly set aside and the two doctors tried to entice their newly arrived sister to all the fun of the fair. If there was a little money to spend they took her to a cheap seat at the theatre; if there wasn’t, they gathered round their own piano or gave a tea party to their exiled Polish friends, when talk and laughter and teasing went on around the oil lamp and the tea-table set with Bronia’s homemade cakes. Manya often withdrew early from those parties to work alone in her room, because she felt she had no time to play.

“Come out, Miss Bookworm!” called Casimir one evening; “it is Poland that calls; you have got to come this time. Hat and coat, quick! I’ve got complimentary tickets for a concert.”

“But . . .”

“But me no buts! It’s that young Pole we were talking of and very few people have taken seats. We must go to fill the hall. I’ve got some volunteers and we are going to clap our hands off to give him the feeling of success. If you only knew how beautifully he plays!”

Marie could not resist her gay brother-in-law with his dark, sparkling eyes. Downstairs she hastened, dressing as she went, and ran to catch the old horse bus. She sat in the half-empty hall and watched the tall, thin man with the wonderful face and shock of copper-red hair walk up the platform and open the piano. She listened . . . Liszt, Schumann, Chopin lived again under his marvellous fingers. Marie was passionately moved. The pianist in his threadbare coat, playing to empty benches, did not seem to her an obscure beginner, but a king, almost a god.

The Dluskis asked him to their home. He went, taking with him his beautiful future wife whom Manya’s mother had known. Mrs. Sklodovska used to say of the girl that she could never take her out because she was too beautiful. Sometimes the fiery-haired young man would go to the Dluski’s piano, and at his touch, the common thing became sublime with heavenly music; for he who played was Paderewski, someday to be world famous, first as a pianist and then as President of a free Poland.

But those days were still far away. In 1891 Marie lived in Paris among a group of Polish exiles who seemed to make a little Polish island in the French city. They were young; they were gay; they were poor. On the fête days of the year, they met for parties in which everything was as Polish as they could make it. They ate Polish cakes, they acted Polish plays, they printed their programmes in Polish and decorated them with Polish scenes: a cottage in an expanse of snow, a dreamy boy bending over books, a Father Christmas throwing scientific textbooks down a chimney, an empty purse that rats had gnawed. When they acted plays, Marie was too busy to learn a part; but in a tableau, she once represented “Poland breaking her chains.” Dressed in a long tunic such as the ancients wore, the colours of the Polish flag draped round her and her fair hair framing her Slav face, she was greeted by all the young people as a very vision of Poland.

Yet to show love for Poland, even in free Paris, was a dangerous thing. Mr. Sklodovski begged Manya not to be seen again in a Polish festivity which could get into the newspapers. “You know,” he wrote, “that there are people in Paris noting the names of those who take any part in Polish affairs and this might be a trouble to you and prevent you getting a post later on in Poland. It is wiser to keep out of the limelight.”

Marie scarcely needed that hint from her father. She wanted to give all her time to work, to live alone, free from the interruption of the piano, of her brother-in-law’s evening chatter, of friends dropping in. And she wanted to live nearer to the university to save her bus fares and the time the bus took.

Sadly, accompanied by both the Dluskis, she left the comfort and friendliness of her sister’s home and set out to find her own work place, her own utter solitude.

She was going to live the life of her dreams, a life entirely given up to study. She would have to do it on one pound a week or rather less. Out of that she would have to pay for her room, her food, her clothes, her paper, her books and her university fees. Could it be done? That was her mathematical problem and, fortunately, she was good at mathematics, but that particular problem would take some doing. “Ah!” she thought, “I needn’t eat much!” She had never had time to learn to cook. Her friends said that she didn’t even know what went into soup. She didn’t know and she hadn’t time. She would never dream of taking time from physics to prepare a dinner. So she lived on bread and butter, cherries and tea, with an occasional egg or a piece of chocolate.

Her room was cheap—4s. 6d. a week. It was just an attic under the roof, lit by a sloping window, unheated, with no gas and no water. Her only furniture was a folding iron bedstead with her Polish mattress, a stove, a deal table, a kitchen chair, a washing basin, an oil lamp with a penny shade, a water bucket which she had to fill at the common tap on the landing, a spirit lamp to cook her food, two plates, one knife, a fork, a spoon, a cup, a saucepan, a kettle and three glasses for tea. When visitors came, her trunk was seat enough for two.

Two sacks a year of charcoal, which she bought on the street and carried up, bucket by bucket, all the six storeys, gave her all the warmth she allowed herself. Light she could almost do without. As soon as it began to get dark, she went to the St. Geneviève library and read there, her head in her hands, her elbows on the long table, till closing time at ten at night. After that she only needed oil in her lamp to last her till two in the morning, when she went to bed.

That was food, house, warmth and light settled. As to clothes, Marie could sew and brush and she meant to keep herself neat by brushing and mending, not by buying. She could do her own washing in her basin at the cost of a little soap.

That was a deliciously cheap life she planned in which nothing should interrupt her learning. But girls’ bodies have a way of having something to say on their own account. Marie was surprised that often, when she left her books, she turned giddy. She even fainted sometimes on her way to bed before she had time to lie down. When she returned to consciousness, she told herself that she must be ill; but even of that she took no notice, merely thinking she would soon be better.

When her doctor brother-in-law told her she looked ill, she replied that she had been working and turned the conversation with a request for the baby. She had begun to make a great pet of Bronia’s new baby and liked to turn attention from herself.

But luckily, one day, Marie fainted in public and the girl who saw it fetched Casimir. By the time he arrived, Marie was well again, but Casimir insisted on examining her. Then without a word he examined the room. Where, he asked, was the food cupboard? Manya hadn’t got such a thing. Nowhere was there anything that showed any sign of eating and only a packet of tea to suggest that Marie drank anything.

“What have you eaten to-day?” asked the doctor.

“To-day? . . . I don’t know . . . I lunched . . .”

“What did you eat?”

“Cherries . . . . Oh, all sorts of things. . . .”

In the end Marie had to confess that since yesterday she had eaten a bunch of radishes and half a pound of cherries. She had worked till three in the morning and she had slept only four hours.

The doctor was furious, furious with the little fool, looking at him with innocent, cheerful grey eyes and more furious with himself for not having seen that his clever sister-in-law was a great silly in some things.

Sternly he ordered her to collect what she would want for a week and to come with him. He was so angry he wouldn’t talk. At home, Bronia was sent out to buy beefsteak and Marie was ordered to eat it properly underdone in its red gravy and with its crisp potatoes. In less than a week she was again the healthy girl who had so lately come from Warsaw.

Because she was worried about her examination, she was allowed to go back to her attic on condition that she would feed herself sensibly. But alas, the very next day she was living on the air that blows.

Work! . . . Work! . . . Marie was feeling her own brain growing. Her hands were getting cleverer. Soon Professor Lippman trusted her with a piece of original research and she had won her opportunity to show her skill and the originality of her mind. Any day of six she could be seen, in her coarse science overall, standing before an oak table in the lofty physical laboratory of the Sorbonne watching some delicate piece of apparatus or gazing at the steady boiling of some fascinating substance. Other similar workers were round her, men for the most part, utterly silent, doing a thing that was more absorbing than talk.

But when the experiments had come out, the boys looked at the girl, said a word at the door, pressed round her to make friends. She was growing a little less standoffish. Once the boys’ eagerness to walk with her became so eager that her friend Mademoiselle Dydyuska had to shoo them away with her parasol. Marie had no time for friendship. With an iron will, a mad love for perfection and an incredible stubbornness she stuck to her work.

She won her licence in Physics in 1893 and in Mathematics in 1894, being top of the list in Physics and second in Mathematics. She was also working for perfection in French, refusing to allow any Polish accent to remain on her tongue; she intended to speak French like the French with only a little rolling of the “r,” which, though she did not intend it, only added to her charm.

She was not too busy to take note of flowers and springtime in Paris. She never forgot that she was a Polish peasant belonging to the fields. She spent Sunday in the country and talked of the lilacs and fruit trees in bloom and the air which was scented with flowers.

When the scorching days of July came, there was another examination. Marie was nervous. With thirty others shut into an airless room she gazed at the paper whose words danced and glimmered before her eyes. She pulled herself together and wrote. She waited, as so many others have done, with a sinking heart for the day of the result. When it came, she crept to listen to the announcement into a corner of the great amphitheatre where she felt very insignificant in the crowd of students and their parents, for she was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Foreword
• I. Manya Singing
• II. Manya Learning
• III. Rebels
• IV. A Whole Year’s Holiday
• V. People
• VI. Fortunate Misfortune
• VII. Change
• VIII. “I take the Sun and throw it . . .”
• IX. Marie’s Love Story
• X. Madame Curie
• XI. The Great Discovery
• XII. A Light in the Dark
• XIII. Not for Sale
• XIV. Darkness
• XV. Whatever Happens
• XVI. War
• XVII. At Home
• XVIII. Abroad
• XIX. Holiday