双语·居里夫人的故事 第十七章　归家

Chapter XVII　At Home

MARIE was at home again in a big old-fashioned flat on the Seine Quay side. The Seine has two islands in the heart of Paris: the Ile de la Cité, the ship-shaped isle, the oldest part of Paris, the old, with its sombre, beautiful and famous buildings; and the Ile St. Louis, old too and more lonely, where Marie lived on the Quai de Bethune. Two centuries before, the houses in the Rue de Bethune had been inhabited by dukes and gentlemen of the court. Marie's flat was a rambling place of corridors and many stairs. Her rooms were immense and lofty and empty. She had never learnt how to be rich or how to draw comfort around herself. Her few pieces of mahogany furniture stood about anyhow on the wide spaces of the slippery polished floor! She and Irène shivered and didn't notice it in the icy cold and bareness, but Eve spent her pocket money on attempts to make her own huge den cosy and elegant. One room was beautiful, Marie's study with its severe bookcases, its portrait of Pierre and its vase of flowers; and all the rooms had the beauty of light, for the windows were high and curtainless and they looked out on to the view that all the artists paint: the broad sunlit Seine with its busy little ships and colourful heavy barges and the towers of Notre Dame in the distance.

Marie had chosen the island for its loneliness and its quiet, but she seemed not to mind that, in fact, her house was full of noises. Eve's scales re-sounded on the piano hour by hour, a cat woke the echoes galloping down the corridors, the door bell clanged and the telephone rang through the emptiness, while the raucous syrens of the tugs came in from the river.

By eight o'clock every morning Marie's energetic, rapid footsteps, warned Irène and Eve that the busy day had begun. Any day for the next sixteen years was something like this: At eight-fortyfive three blasts of a motor horn told Marie that her little car was at the door. She hastily snatched her hat and coat and ran downstairs, because she would never think of keeping her chauffeur waiting more than three minutes. She began by having the handy man at the Institute to drive her, and when she took to a regular chauffeur, the poor man wept for grief that someone else should drive Marie. She drove across the Tournelle bridge and across the busy quays to the Latin quarter, where from the beginning of history, gay and rowdy students have lived in proverbial happiness and poverty and where, now-a-days, all the great learned institutes and buildings stand.

In the Rue Pierre Curie, Marie found herself at the entrance to the Institute of Radium. There was a crowd in the hall. Every morning there was a crowd in the hall and Marie called it the Soviet. Her students from this or that department always came to catch her before she went to her work, so that they should not trespass on her time, they said. They had a particular question to ask her or something to show her; or they hoped that Marie, overnight, had got out a problem for them. She often had. “Oh, Mr. So-and-So, your solution wouldn't work, but I have another for you…” Marie turned from one difficult piece of work to another, the crowd increased, each one bringing a difficult conundrum. Marie seemed not to mind what mental gymnastics they expected of her. Problems were often put to her in broken French or broken English, which added to the difficulty in hand. The Institute was quite a tower of Babel with all the languages of the East as well as all the tongues of the West. Marie tells a tale of her Chinese student who talked with her in English: he was so polite that even when she was wrong and he knew it, he had to agree with her and she had to use the very best of her brain to guess the silent contradiction which was at the back of his mind. She said that she was ashamed of her own manners in the presence of her Eastern students: “They are so much more civilized than we.”

The hall session often seemed unending and Marie would have to sit to it and, as there were no chairs, to sit on the stairs. It is a charming picture to think of her squatting on the lowest stair teaching her tall students at their feet. She was chief of the laboratory; she had read every book on anything to do with Radium in five languages; she was still inventing new techniques; she seemed to work by magic; her pupils could trust her guidance entirely. She was both bold and prudent.

One by one the students would go off to their particular experiments. Perhaps one who had something to show would take Marie with him; perhaps she would at last find herself free to go to her own laboratory and do her own work.

At mid-day she walked home to lunch but she still discussed Physics at the table with Irène. Eve sometimes felt out of it. Her mother and sister talked of BB prime and BB squared and as, in French, BB is pronounced bélé, which means baby, Eve was left wondering what a squared baby and a prime baby could possibly be.

But, in 1926, Irène married a brilliant young scientist called Joliot and Eve had the conversation to herself.

“Darling, you do the talking,” said Marie. “What are they doing in the world?” And Eve would talk to her about everything, for everything interested her, especially simple and childish things. She liked to hear how fast Eve drove, or what the baby said, when Irène's baby began to say things, or what people thought of the new Fascists.

“Ah!” said Marie, if by chance anyone praised a dictator, “I have lived under oppression. You haven't. You don't understand how happy you are to live in a free country.” And if anyone upheld the right of a Government to kill a rebel, she said: “You will never convince me that to guillotine Lavoisier served any purpose.”

After lunch the car would fetch her again and perhaps she would go to the flower market to buy her common garden flowers or wild ones if she could get them, for she never liked smart, greenhouse things. Or perhaps she had an appointment in the Luxembourg gardens with a very important personage, her baby granddaughter, Helène. She would sit and play at making sand-pies with her till it was time to go to the afternoon's session of the Academy of Medicine. There Marie was the only woman and her seat was next to her friend Dr. Roux, who had been Pasteur's most devoted disciple.

After the Academy, Marie went back to the laboratory and worked till dinner time on ordinary days; but sometimes till 2.0 in the morning if her experiments needed it.

Sometimes the seriousness of the place was disturbed by a tea party given in honour of some student who had become a doctor of science. Then scientific glasses became tea cups and glass rods served as spoons and the party closed with an address by Marie in which she congratulated the new doctor. The two happiest of those teas were those which celebrated Irène's doctorate and that of her husband, Frédéric Joliot. In 1934 those two made a great discovery, nothing less than artificial radio-activity. They bombarded aluminium and other substances with the rays of Radium and transformed them into new radioactive substances which had never been known before and which became sources from which Radium could be drawn. Scientists saw that a time might come when substances could be manufactured to do the work of Radium the rare. What a wonderful thing that would be, for across the garden, opposite the Radium Institute, was the building in which Radium was helping to cure cancer by the method known as Curietherapy. Radium was necessary and Radium was very rare.

Then there were the letters. Think of the letters of an important person! Fortunately a secretary opened the thousands of them— letters from thoughtless people asking for autographs, which they didn't get; letters asking foolish questions; letters from advertisers, from beggars. And in the great piles just a letter here and there that needed an answer.

Lastly, Marie had her lessons to give. Those were the things she hated. On a Monday and a Wednesday she was sick with nervousness from dawn till five o'clock, becaue she had to stand in the little amphitheatre and address some thirty students at once.

In those years she was threatened with blindness. The doctors told her that she must put up with being nearly blind for two or three years till she could have an operation. Probably they never dreamed what that meant to her. She wanted to work and she hated sympathy. Whatever happened, she did not want other people to know about her eyes. Eve had to book her glasses at the oculist's as those of Madame Carré. If she had a student's paper to correct, she made him bring it to her and then answer cleverly put questions on it, so that in that way she knew what he had written. She thought of every clever device to conceal her misfortune and the people who guessed pretended to notice nothing. That was to be truly kind. After her four operations she had to teach her eyes to work again. They would never work as they had worked, but her courage did not fail; she made them work.

But let us get back to Marie's day. We left her having late dinner with Eve. After dinner Eve had to go out and Marie, who was tired, lay on her sofa and watched her daughter dress. “Horrible heels, Eve! You will never make me believe that women were made for walking on stilts.”

“And what's this new fashion of bare backs? Bare in front is bearable, but these kilometres of bare back! Still the dress is pretty enough. Turn round and let me see how pretty you are.” Marie looked at her daughter with consternation: “I haven't any objection on principle to all this daubing. I know it has always been done. In ancient Egypt women invented worse things. I can say only one thing: I think it is hideous. You are cruel to your eyebrows and you daub your lips for no reason.”

“But, Mé, I really look better so.”

“Better! ! ! Listen, to console myself I shall come and kiss you in bed to-morrow morning before you have had time to put these horrors on your face.”

When Eve had gone, Marie, in her armchair, read a little poetry or a few pages of a favourite novel, but not for more than an hour. The floor was her place—the floor that gave her room to spread all her Physics papers around her and to work out her problems till two in the morning.

So Eve found her mother when she came in, a mother so absorbed in work that she did not notice her but went on counting, half aloud as she used to do at school and in Polish.