Marie Curie by Kathleen Krull Page A

a business lunch, then later walked to the library from the Sorbonne. Stepping off a curb into the most crowded intersection in Paris, he walked straight into the path of a horse-drawn wagon. It dragged him under, crushing his skull.
    He died instantly.
    Would he have been able to avoid the fall if his legs had been stronger? Was he daydreaming, instead of paying attention to the traffic? Or was he thinking about his last unpleasant conversation with Marie? What if the day hadn’t been rainy and an umbrella hadn’t obscured his vision? Of all the questions, the one that most taunted Marie was why had her last words to him been reproachful, so harsh and uncharacteristic of their love?
    The sudden death of her husband at age forty-nine was a horrific blow, the loss of her best friend, soul mate, the source of her serenity, the devoted father of her two daughters, and her only real peer in science. She described her feeling as “wanting to scream like a savage beast.”

    But she didn’t scream. Not out loud. Nor did she talk about him; around the children she never allowed his name to be spoken. In a way today’s child psychologists wouldn’t applaud, she assumed that erasing Pierre would enable baby Ève and nine-year-old Irène to get over their father’s death more quickly. We don’t know whether Marie ever read Freud and his theories about the negative consequences of repressing feelings, but from her actions it seems unlikely. Not only was Pierre gone, she now became her most remote as a mother, leaving it to the children’s grandfather to provide emotional comfort. She did start a new notebook, of tan canvas, a journal addressing Pierre as if he were still alive, hoping against hope that communication was still possible: “I live only for your memory and to make you proud of me.” She was comforted that maybe “an accumulation of energy” had come from his casket toward her during the funeral.
    Although there were moments when she forgot the pain, for a long time afterward she would be overtaken by “the feeling of obsessive distress.” As always, she dealt with a black depression by escaping into work. Three days after the accident, she was back in the lab, starting another new notebook of experiments, refining work of Pierre’s. “I no longer know what joy is or even pleasure,” she wrote in her mourning notebook. “I will never be able to laugh genuinely until the end of my days.”
    When the French government offered her a pension, she refused it, basically saying, “I am thirty-nine and able to support myself, thank you very much.” No longer part of a team, she was still a scientist in her own right. An increasingly respected one. It was a turning point, going from a duo to a solo.
    She devoted all her energy to continuing alone the work they had undertaken together. In her mourning notebook she confessed her motivation came from “the desire to prove to the world, and above all to myself, that that which you loved so much has some real value.”
    She proved it in grand style in 1909, when the University of Paris and the Pasteur Institute decided to join forces to build her a large laboratory from scratch. She had always loved Louis Pasteur’s reference to labs as “sacred places” where “humanity grows, fortifies itself, and becomes better.” Now she would have a sacred place of her own. Marie involved herself in every detail of her new Radium Institute, to be erected a few streets away from the now-famous “shed.”
    She was also hard at work on her exhaustive summary of radioactivity, which was eventually published in 1910. The two-volume Treatise on Radioactivity provided others with a clear, useful history. That same year, she finally succeeded in isolating radium in its purest form yet.
    She kept up with the ongoing research of others. Unlike Mendeleyev, she changed with the times. The temperamental Russian chemist had kept on revising his table of elements until his death in 1907,