READ IT FIRST

Marie Curie and her daughters

Copyright © Shelley Emling, 2012.
All rights reserved.

First published in 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the U.S.—a division

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 Contents

Acknowledgments xi
Prologue America: A Fresh Point of Departure for the
World’s Greatest Scientist xiii
Chapter 1 An Absolutely Miserable Year 1
Chapter 2 Moving On 15
Chapter 3 Meeting Missy 31
Chapter 4 Finally, America 45
Chapter 5 The White House 59
Chapter 6 New and Improved 73
Chapter 7 Another Dynamic Duo 87
Chapter 8 Turning to America—Again 101
Chapter 9 Into the Spotlight 117
Chapter 10 The End of a Quest 133
Chapter 11 Tributes and New Causes 147
Chapter 12 All about Eve 161
Chapter 13 The Ravages of Another World War 175
Chapter 14 Rough Waters 189
Chapter 15 The Legacy 203
Selected Bibliography 213
Index 215

Eight pages of photographs appear between pages 104 and 105.

 Chapter 1

An Absolutely Miserable Year

M adame Marie Skłodowska Curie had come to Brussels in the first

few days of November 1911 to talk physics with her peers—and
also to escape. She was the only woman among twenty-three men at-
tending a gathering of some of the world’s greatest minds that included
Albert Einstein and Max Planck. When they weren’t debating the chal-
lenge to modern physics presented by the discovery of radioactivity, the
scientists surely talked among themselves about the rumors of illicit ro-
mance swirling around the forty-three-year-old widow. In one photo-
graph of the delegation, Marie can be seen sitting at a table in the front,
with her head down over some paperwork, while her former professor,
the great mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré, looks on. Behind
them stands her married lover, Paul Langevin, thirty-eight, a dashing
father of four and an expert on molecular and kinetic theory.
The wealthy industrialist and philanthropist Ernest Solvay had orga-
nized the all-expenses-paid week-long conference to focus on “the theory
of radiation and quanta.” He had invited Marie and the others in June—
just as her life was starting to unravel. Indeed, his invitation couldn’t
have come at a better time. After all she had discovered, after all she had
achieved, Marie’s presence was no longer welcomed in France even by
some who had once been among her greatest admirers. Photos resem-
bling mug shots appeared in newspapers in an anti-Semitic broadside.
 2     Marie Curie and Her Daughters

Adversaries showed up at her home, hurling rocks at the windows. Fellow

professors at the Sorbonne wanted the university’s first female teacher
out. The mother of two was close to a nervous breakdown, on the brink
of madness. The Solvay Conference was a welcome diversion.
Almost all of those invited had played a prominent part in the ad-
vancement of major scientific theories. And perhaps no one more so
than Marie, who had discovered two important elements, polonium and
radium. A few, such as the prominent Sorbonne professor Jean Perrin,
Marie had known quite well and for many years. Others, such as Einstein,
she was meeting for the first time.
Complaining of nagging headaches, she walked out of several com-
mittee meetings before they were over. But her obvious distress didn’t
stop her from discussing with other scientists the creation of an inter-
national standard—called the Curie, in memory of Pierre Curie—that
could be used to compare radium preparations from different countries.
Preparation of the radium standard, which is still in use today, had been
assigned to Marie, who argued in the face of some opposition that a Curie
must correspond to more than just an infinitesimal amount of radium.
Worn down with worry, Marie was handed a telegram midway through
the conference. The modest woman who hated attention was almost
afraid to open it. But the news was not what she expected: “Nobel Prize
for chemistry awarded to you. Letter follows.” It could just as easily have
been talking about the weather for all its simplicity. But this message from
Carl Aurivillius, head of the Swedish Committee on Prizes, confirmed
her place in history. Marie was about to become the first person—man
or woman—to be awarded two Nobel Prizes. To this day she remains the
only person to have been awarded two Nobel science prizes in different
subjects. (Linus Pauling is the only person to have been awarded two un-
shared Nobel Prizes—the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the 1962
Nobel Peace Prize.)
As news of the second Nobel Prize circulated, some at the meeting
grumbled to themselves that, in essence, Marie had been awarded the
same prize twice, since both were related to her work on radioactivity.
But praise for her years of research also flowed forth, and many of the
gentlemen in attendance were gracious enough to offer their heartfelt
 An Absolutely Miserable Year     3

congratulations. And yet the realization remained that despite being

awarded a second Nobel Prize—an unprecedented feat for anyone but
especially for a woman in a field that remained the bastion of men—1911
was a year of humiliation, depression, and defeat for Marie. Despite so
many accomplishments, her star had been falling fast during the last sev-
eral months and she’d become a woman on the edge, close to losing it all.
Her life’s downward spiral had begun almost a year before when, in
December 1910, she had decided to emulate her late husband, Pierre, by
competing for a single open seat in the French Academy of Sciences, an
institution that held sway over the support and direction of French sci-
ence. Although the prestigious organization boasted only 68 members,
the idea of a woman trying to break into the male stronghold sparked
so much attention that all 163 members of the French Institute—the
umbrella organization representing five different academies—showed
up to have their say. Despite the ringing endorsement of the respected
newspaper Le Figaro which had named her the nation’s most famous
physicist the election on January 24, 1911 did not go as Marie had hoped.
There were all sorts of reasons for this, but not one of them made sense.
Driven by the country’s growing xenophobia, some members circulated
a bizarre charge that Marie’s application for membership had actually
been contrived by a Jewish cabal to block the honor from going to an
equally talented but more Catholic candidate. Next, a conservative peri-
odical fanned the flames by claiming that, with her Polish heritage and a
maiden name like Skłodowska, Marie almost certainly was a Jew herself.
(She wasn’t: her mother was Catholic and her father an atheist.) Another
publication splashed two photos of her on its cover that looked like police
mug shots, making it seem as though she were a criminal on the run. In
the weeks leading up to the vote, an all-out smear campaign took on a
life of its own while willfully ignoring Marie’s impeccable résumé. No
doubt sexism was a major culprit. In the end, Marie lost by only two votes
to radio pioneer Édouard Branly, an inventor who had been honored by
the pope and backed by French Catholics. The vote was so close that the
academy held a second vote as to whether women in general should ever
be admitted. That vote was 90 to 52 against the idea. Indeed, the acad-
emy wouldn’t admit a woman until 1979.
 4     Marie Curie and Her Daughters

But that was only the beginning. The worst was still to come.
A short time after the vote, in the spring of 1911, Henri Bourgeois—a
newspaper editor as well as the brother-in-law of a woman named Jeanne
Langevin, the wife of Marie’s lover Paul Langevin—called on Marie with
some disturbing news. Jeanne had discovered a trove of intimate corre-
spondence between Marie and Paul Langevin—and she had no qualms
about making the letters public.
From most accounts, the revelation was true. Somewhere along the
way Marie’s close friendship and working relationship with Langevin
had blossomed into a full-blown love affair, as their letters attested. In
one particularly affectionate note, published by biographer Susan Quinn
among others, Marie wrote him that, “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, when conditions lend them-
selves. What couldn’t come out of this feeling? 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.”
When Langevin in turn poured out his heart about his marital diffi-
culties, Marie shot off a sharp reply displaying an uncharacteristic posses-
siveness: “But when I know that you are with her, my nights are atrocious,
I can’t sleep, I manage with great difficulty to sleep two or three hours;
I wake up with a sensation of fever and can’t work.” At least a few cir-
culated letters were even more dramatic. In one, a distraught Marie in-
timated she might commit suicide if their relationship didn’t work out.
Irene and Eve “could become orphans between one day and the next if
we don’t arrive at a stable solution,” she wrote. In another, Marie closed
by saying, “My Paul, I embrace you with all my tenderness. . . . I will try
to return to work even though it is difficult, when the nervous system is
so strongly stirred up.” When it came to letters written by Paul, fewer
exist, although Langevin once wrote that he was drawn to Marie “as to
a light . . . and I began to seek from her a little of the tenderness which I
missed at home.”
It’s no surprise that the two were attracted to each other. Langevin had
been one of Pierre Curie’s star students, and admired the man enormously.
 An Absolutely Miserable Year     5

Building on Pierre’s early work with crystals, Langevin later would de-
velop an invention that used sonar signals to help Allied military forces
detect submerged submarines during World War I. In addition, Marie
and Paul had both taught at the Sèvres school for women teachers-in-
training. It also hadn’t hurt that Langevin, five years her junior, was both
handsome and charming.
In scientific circles, it was well known that Paul’s marriage to Jeanne
Langevin was an unhappy union. Fights between the two were legend-
ary and often involved her abusing him physically. One day he turned
up at his lab with bruises; he told his concerned coworkers that his wife,
mother-in-law, and sister-in-law had attacked him. On various occasions,
Langevin had promised his wife that he would stop seeing Marie. But
now Jeanne Langevin possessed the letters proving that their romance
was only deepening. And so the warning from Jeanne’s brother-in-law
was clear: Jeanne was capable of anything, which meant that Marie’s life
was in danger.
With that, the year turned into one of histrionics, with Jeanne Langevin
flying into rages and vowing to rid her family of Marie, whatever it took.
One night, when the two women bumped into each other on the street,
Jeanne told Marie she’d murder her if she didn’t leave France—now.
Marie’s friend Henriette Perrin later said she’d never forget the image of
this illustrious researcher “wandering like a beast being hunted.” Yet there
were more letters back and forth between the two scientists. By the sum-
mer of 1911, Marie and Paul, unable to part ways, were meeting in the
Paris apartment Langevin had rented the year before. By this point, he
had made a habit of escaping the family home and staying in the apart-
ment for weeks at a time. Eventually he always returned for the sake of
the children. The days brought more brawls between Paul and his wife
with Jeanne eventually filing charges of abandonment. Soon enough, the
French press had gotten hold of intimate letters—or forgeries based on
them—and many were published.
Although Marie’s daughter Eve, at age six, was too young to under-
stand what was going on, the drama was starting to take its toll on thir-
teen-year-old Irene, so Marie sent both girls to Poland for the summer. It
was their first visit to Marie’s homeland. As she had hoped, they loved it.
 6     Marie Curie and Her Daughters

For all that Marie had going on in her personal and professional life, the
writings of Marie and her girls released by Hélène Langevin-Joliot re-
veal no abdication of her parental duties. No matter how tumultuous the
times, Marie always took a few moments to record observations about
her daughters’ development in her notebook. She recorded when Irene
first got her period, stating that “she doesn’t lose much blood and scarcely
suffers.” She recorded personality traits as well. When it came to little
Eve, Marie described her as a very sensitive child in tune with the feel-
ings of others, recalling how once when she had “reproached Irene for I
don’t know what. . . . Eve dissolved into tears.” In her letters to her girls,
Marie was no gushing mother. But even when the turmoil was at its
worst, Marie never lowered the high standards she set for her children.
And she always kept a watchful eye. In August 1911, when both girls
were in Poland staying with Marie’s sister Bronya, Marie wrote to express
worry that she hadn’t heard from them for a few days. She asked that
they write her immediately. In conjunction with her sister, Marie made
certain that they enjoyed a lot of time outdoors and also that their intel-
lectual progress was closely monitored. Irene was assigned a half-hour
German lesson as well as trigonometry lessons every day of her holiday.
Their academic training was evidently rigorous. There’s a letter from a
defensive Irene even pushing back after being criticized by Marie for
her handwriting: “Furthermore, I find that my writing is prettier straight
than slanted.”
But no matter how busy they were kept, the girls longed for their
mother. They often ended their letters to Marie with tender farewells
such as: “I kiss you with all my heart on your beautiful tired forehead.”
Once that summer, when Irene wasn’t feeling well, she wrote her mother:
“Oh, how I would have liked to have you here while I was sick.”
Fortunately, by September, Marie was able to join her daughters in
Poland for a happy hiatus—taking the girls on long hiking trips through
the mountains—before she had to head off to Brussels and the Solvay
Conference in late October.
Almost immediately after receiving that first telegram with news of
the Nobel Prize, a second telegram showed up at the conference con-
firming what Marie had heard earlier. Jeanne Langevin was prepared to
 An Absolutely Miserable Year     7

release letters to the press proving that her husband was having an affair
with Marie. In a politically charged atmosphere that was increasingly
intolerant of foreigners—the national elections in 1910 had resulted in a
considerable shift to the right in France’s Chamber of Deputies—right-
wing newspapers stepped up their attacks on Marie even more, tearing
apart the legend they had helped create only a few years before. Indeed,
many publications took notice of Marie’s second Nobel Prize with only
a few words on an inside page. As time went on, newspaper after news-
paper kept hammering away at the story of Marie’s affair but none more
so than the ultra-nationalistic La Libre Presse, with its chauvinistic catch-
phrase “France for the French.”
Most egregious in the collective mind of the French press was Marie’s
warning to Langevin in one particularly emotional letter that he not get
his wife pregnant during a time of reconciliation. Despite the hardened
persona she had always cultivated, Marie showed off her insecurities by
telling Langevin that if he resumed sexual relations with his wife—and
if she then became pregnant—“it would mean a definite separation be-
tween us. . . . I can risk my life and my position for you, but I could not ac-
cept this dishonor.” Many in France found this tantamount to treason at
a time when the country needed all the offspring it could get to ward off
a German threat. As one newspaper worded it, nobody in France should
be concerned that Marie might leave the country because of the scandal,
but rather everybody should be worried for the “French mother, who . . .
wants only to keep her children. . . . It is with this mother, not with the
foreign woman, that the public sympathizes. . . . All French mothers are
on the side of the victim and against her persecutors.”
A humiliated Marie left the Solvay Conference early and returned to
France, where by now the public’s animosity toward her was palpable.
What should have been a glorious moment—the winning of a second
Nobel Prize—had come at one of the worst periods of her life. For the
hardworking scientist, the love affair had stymied any celebration and
had led, by November 1911, to a quick but ignominious toppling from
grace for the world’s most famous woman.
Most hurtful was her arrival back at her house near Paris, where she
came face-to-face with an angry mob hurling stones at her windows
 8     Marie Curie and Her Daughters

amid shouts of “Go home to Poland,” which spoke to the intensity of

the public’s malice toward her. Marie had no choice but to sweep up her
two horrified daughters and seek refuge at the home of her good friends
Marguerite and Emile Borel. Earlier, the young Irene, who so idolized
her mother, was at school when a friend pointed to a newspaper headline
about the Langevin affair. The stunned girl skimmed the story and re-
portedly burst into tears.
As Eve later wrote in her biography of her mother, people began refer-
ring to Marie as a Russian, a German, a Pole, a Jew, or some combination
of all four. Mostly, though, she was simply called that “foreign woman”
who had come to Paris like a usurper to conquer a high position im-
properly. Ironically, in earlier years, it was the same scurrilous right-wing
tabloid press that had done Marie an inadvertent favor by promoting and
thus elevating the public’s view of the Nobel Prize, which previously had
been scarcely noticed in the field of science. But now, despite their failure
to verify the innuendos, hungry reporters seemed determined to topple
the icon they had helped build up.
Rather than duck the issue, a protective Paul Langevin challenged
Gustave Tery, the editor of a particularly vitriolic newspaper, to a pub-
lic duel with pistols. Wearing bowler hats and dark suits, the two men
faced each other some twenty-five paces apart. Although dueling was
still popular, the practices were—by 1911—more of a ritual than any-
thing else, with participants rarely injured. And in this case, too, no one
fired a weapon and no one was hurt. After having called Langevin a boor
and a coward hiding behind a woman’s skirt, Tery ultimately admitted
he couldn’t raise his weapon against a man who was undoubtedly one
of France’s greatest scientists. The Los Angeles Times thought this event
highly amusing, headlining its report: “Pistol Duel Pantomine: Principals
Let Seconds Do the Shooting and No Blood Is Let.”
Throughout the whole ordeal, Albert Einstein remained supportive of
both Langevin and Marie, writing Marie of his admiration for her spirit
and energy. (He also admitted to a friend that he didn’t believe Marie
“attractive enough to become dangerous for anyone.”) Pierre’s brother
Jacques also remained extremely sympathetic and protective. “Doesn’t
one have the right to sue newspapers for damages?” he asked her. Marie
 An Absolutely Miserable Year     9

apparently offered no evidence to counter the accusations, although she

did at one point issue a statement to the press calling intrusions into
her private life “abominable” and vowing to fight for damages. Without
providing proof, Paul later charged that the letters had been altered and
that certain parts had been omitted. But, for whatever reason, no action
against the press from Marie came to pass.
At the same time, Marie also received letters of support from fans in
America including the dancer Loie Fuller, who had become acquainted
with both Marie and Pierre years before when she contacted them about
incorporating luminous radium into her costumes and stage sets. After
hearing about the scandal, Fuller wrote Marie: “I love you. I take your
two hands in mine and I love you. Pay no attention to the lies, c’est la vie.”
But while many friends and colleagues stuck with Curie, some of the
most important people in her life did not. One of them was Paul Appell—
who had been an extremely close friend and one of her first professors
at the Sorbonne. Appell, as dean of the faculty at the Sorbonne, went so
far as to start organizing a group of university professors to collectively
demand that Marie leave France. When Appell found out that his own
daughter, Marguerite Borel, had taken Marie and her daughters in to live
with her for a while, he immediately summoned her to his home. Borel
found him seething. “Why mix in this affair which doesn’t concern you?”
he demanded, chucking a shoe against the wall. He told her that the very
next day he planned to see Marie so that he could insist, in person, that
she move out of the country. In fact, he had already arranged a chair for
her in Poland. “Her situation is impossible in Paris. . . . I can’t hold back
the sea which is drowning her,” he said, pushing for a move that Marie
never would have wanted.
By her own account, written many years later, Marguerite Borel vowed
never to speak to her father again if he yielded to this “idiotic nationalis-
tic movement.” Under this threat, Appell caved in and agreed to put off
his decision. Borel noted that none of this would have happened if Marie
were a man.
By the end of 1911, Eve wrote that her mother had sunk into a debili-
tating depression. Already she had lost a sister, a mother, a husband, and
a father. Three years before Pierre’s death, in August 1903, she had also
 10     Marie Curie and Her Daughters

suffered a miscarriage. And now she was about to lose her reputation.
There came a point when Marie no longer felt strong enough even to
make the journey from work to the house she loved with the large garden
in Sceaux, even though it was only about three miles south of Paris. She
decided to sell the beloved retreat—located near where Pierre and his
mother were buried. It was a place she found hard to part with. But for
the sake of her health she bought a flat at 36, quai de Béthune on the
fashionable Île Saint-Louis, overlooking the Seine and within easy walk-
ing distance of the Sorbonne, a quiet place where she and her daughters
intended to live from January 1912.
If things in France weren’t good, in Stockholm—where she was due to
receive her second Nobel Prize in December 1911—they weren’t much
better. After news of the love affair broke, a member of the Swedish
Academy of Sciences tried to dissuade Marie from traveling to Stockholm
to receive her prize in person so that the Swedish king wouldn’t have to
shake hands with an adulteress. In a letter dated December 1, he cited
her published love letters and “the ridiculous duel of M. Langevin” and
pointed out in a stinging rebuke that, “If the Academy had believed the
letters . . . might be authentic it would not, in all probability, have given
you the Prize.”
With this, Marie’s fighting spirit returned. In an angry letter, she
snapped back: “In fact the Prize has been awarded for discovery of
Radium and Polonium. I believe that there is no connection between my
scientific work and the facts of private life. . . . I cannot accept the idea in
principle that the appreciation of the value of scientific work should be
influenced by libel and slander concerning private life.”
Upon hearing of the exchange, Langevin couldn’t stay quiet either. He
wrote directly to Svante Arrhenius, one of the men who had nominated
Marie: “One cannot judge . . . the correspondence which is reproduced
in a distorted fashion—by alterations and omissions . . . if one does not
know the condition in which I lived for thirteen years, nor from what
kind of people these attacks came.”
And so a determined Marie endured a forty-eight-hour train journey
to attend the Nobel ceremony scheduled December 10, accompanied by
her fourteen-year-old daughter Irene and her sister Bronya. As planned,
 An Absolutely Miserable Year     11

King Gustaf V bestowed the prize on her. Although a German newspaper

distributed in Sweden had published a report on “The Letters of Marie
Curie,” she enjoyed a dignified reception from the sophisticated Swedes,
especially from the women. In Marie’s acceptance speech she acknowl-
edged other scientists who had contributed to the field of radioactivity,
but soundly reasserted her claim to be the first to discover its properties.
Taking full credit for her accomplishments, she reminded the committee
that “isolating radium as a pure salt was undertaken by me alone.”
Later, at a formal banquet with King Gustaf, she described radioactiv-
ity as “an infant that I saw being born, which I have contributed to raising
with all my strength. The child has grown. It has become beautiful.”
In her autobiography, Marie wrote nothing of the Langevin scandal,
but recorded that the Nobel Prize was a very exceptional honor recogniz-
ing her achievements.
The celebration in Stockholm gave way to the ugly reality of Paris.
Upon her return, another vicious article deplored the invasion of foreign-
ers at the Sorbonne, charging that the female students were there only
to land husbands. In her characteristic way, a strong-willed Marie imme-
diately went back to lecturing at the Sorbonne and working in her small
Paris laboratory. But the calm of her routine was about to be shattered
again. Less than two weeks after the ceremony, on December 19, 1911,
she was buckled over by acute stomach pain and rushed to the hospital on
a stretcher with what was thought to be a kidney infection. She recovered
from the initial attack, but some old lesions pressing on her kidney—pos-
sibly the result of exposure to radiation—required an operation. Marie
asked that the surgery not take place before March so that she could at-
tend a meeting of physicists at the end of February.
Although her surgery went better than anyone could have hoped,
Marie’s health was poor throughout 1912. She grew abnormally thin and
often was so weak and feverish that she struggled even to get out of
bed. Some thought she suffered from tuberculosis. Others blamed cancer.
Secrecy about her illness backfired and sparked a flurry of malicious ru-
mors. The hospital’s manager and its Mother Superior warned her of one
published article that claimed she was in the hospital about to give birth
to Langevin’s child. Normally, patient medical records were inviolable,
 12     Marie Curie and Her Daughters

but the pair was so incensed by this libelous charge that they offered to
open up her records to the public. Marie agreed. Newspapers revealed her
doctor’s diagnosis—kidney infection—which mostly stopped the spread
of rumors. But what was not mentioned was that she had experienced a
nervous breakdown that was the by-product of the deepest, darkest de-
pression of her life, more stubborn than episodes in previous years. Eve
later wrote that her mother had grown suicidal. She refused to eat, and
her weight dropped from 123 pounds to 103.
After becoming ill, Marie placed her daughters under the care of a
Polish governess in early 1912 and barely saw them during the follow-
ing year and a half, except when they visited her briefly at a house in
Brunoy, about thirteen miles from Paris, which she had rented under her
sister’s name, Bronya Dłuski. A bucolic village, Brunoy was the perfect
spot for someone seeking to recover from a traumatic episode. Only a
very few close friends and colleagues were told where she was staying.
Letters between Marie and her daughters during those first few months
show a parent distracted by her own health concerns—but not inatten-
tive. In one, Marie asked Irene if she’d become a bit careless in her cycling
excursions. “I’m glad you are starting to become independent, but I do
not want us to pay too much for that evolution,” she wrote. In another,
Marie commented on Irene’s grammar, urging her to be more diligent
when it came to punctuation. Irene’s letters usually included some kind
of difficult math equation, which she would have solved perfectly. Marie
also wrote often of her concerns over Eve’s health after the girl suffered
from a variety of mysterious maladies in 1912. In May, she wrote that
Eve had a “slight fever climbing to 100 . . . in the evening without other
symptoms.” By the end of 1912, one of the family’s closest friends, the
scientist André Debierne, told Marie that her absence was taking a seri-
ous toll on Eve’s health. Marie managed to pull herself together enough
to spend Christmas in Lausanne, Switzerland, with her daughters while
Eve recovered.
Marie’s seclusion and time away meant she wasn’t around to fully ap-
preciate how greatly Pierre’s death was continuing to impact Irene. For
years, Irene had balked whenever Marie had tried to leave her—even if
only for an hour or so. But Marie appeared to have been unmoved. Marie
 An Absolutely Miserable Year     13

wrote at one stage that Irene “doesn’t speak of her father. . . . She no lon-
ger seems to be thinking about it, but asked for the picture of her father
that we had taken from the window of her bedroom.” Yet Irene wrote
that she often felt sad and alone. And in a letter from Irene to Marie in
August 1909, when Irene was only eleven, she made a point of asking
her mother how the plants on her father’s grave were faring and which
ones were flowering. In a charming note, these were just two of ten very
specific questions posed by Irene to her mother. “I ask you ten questions,”
Irene wrote while on vacation at the seaside. “Respond to all of them
when you write to me.”
Making Irene’s sorrow even worse were the lasting effects of the
death of her grandfather, Dr. Eugene Curie, in February 1910. He had
been Irene’s best friend in the world and both girls’ caretaker while their
mother spent long hours at work. From her writings, Eve was more in
touch with her sister’s emotions than was Marie: “I was very young but
Irene was [much older]. My grandfather raised her from the time she
was a baby and they had a close bond, a great bond. Irene was desolate
when first father died and then her beloved grandfather, who had been
everything to her.”
Irene worshipped the memory of her father and grandfather so it is
no surprise that letters and diaries reveal how hard the Langevin scandal
was on her. She hated having to hide the Curie name she had been taught
to revere and begged Marie to allow Irene to address her letters to Mme
Pierre Curie, as usual. But Marie was determined to escape the press in
Brunoy and so insisted that her daughter’s almost daily correspondence
be addressed to Mme Skłodowska.
Although the love affair between Marie and Paul eventually waned,
the two remained lifelong friends and associates. After one more separa-
tion, Langevin returned to his wife for good, although later he would take
on another mistress. (Years later, Langevin would ask Marie to find a po-
sition at her radium institute for his mistress, one of his former students
named Elaine Montel, and Marie obliged.) The good news for Marie
was that a writ of separation between the couple made no mention of her,
meaning her name would never be dragged through the sordidness of a
divorce court proceeding. In her own comprehensive biography of her
 14     Marie Curie and Her Daughters

mother, Eve never specifically mentioned the Langevin affair, but alluded
to this dark period when she wrote about a “perfidious campaign” that
led Marie to the brink of suicide and madness. Although Langevin never
publicly admitted to having an affair with Marie, his son André later
wrote in a biography of his father: “Isn’t it natural enough that a few years
after Pierre Curie’s death this friendship enhanced by mutual admiration
should have gradually grown into a passion and resulted in a love affair?”
This storm that erupted in 1911 seemed as if it would never end.
Without their precious Mé, as they called their mother, Irene and Eve
were despondent. Marie enjoyed a strong will but failing strength. It
wasn’t clear how, or when, her work and reputation would ever be vindi-
cated, or what would become of the two girls, one of whom was turning
out to be exactly like her mother and father in her passion for science.
Certainly Marie had veered off the track she’d been taking all her life,
since her childhood days in an oppressed Poland.
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Her Daughters

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