[BOOKNOTES] Madame Curie
Madame Curie sits among my pantheon of personal heroes. Here are my booknotes (part 1) from a biography written by Marie Curie’s daughter. The whole book is effused with love.
Marie Curie’s biography holds my personal record for the highest ratio of tears per chapter. I cried about every 10 pages or so, lying on my couch, sipping iced mochas at Sey Coffee, and reading pages in the subway (with my earplugs in to dampen the bustling around me). They weren’t all sad tears; Sometimes I was moved to tears by the kindness of Marie’s family and friends, or beautiful respites in her life after long years of poverty and work.
Her story is straight out of a Dickens novel – it could be a work of fiction, only it actually happened.
Marie grew up in a Poland occupied by Russia. All schools had a Russian inspector who would show up to classrooms unannounced to make sure the kids were not learning Polish history or literature.
In turn, the kids and teachers conspired to continue the Polish curriculum, and when they were alerted that M. Hornberg was in the school hallway, walking towards the classroom, they followed procedures to hide their Polish books and to pretend to be in the middle of a Russian lesson.
Due to political machinations, Marie’s father was removed from his post as under-inspector and had to take a lower-paying job. The family spent the rest of Marie’s life poor. In order to make ends meet her father took on boarding students who occupied the bedrooms in the house. Marie and her siblings slept in the dining room every night, then awoke early in the morning to clean up their bedding before the boarding students came down to breakfast.
Despite the hardships the siblings seemed to have unusually close relationships to one another, and to their father (their mother passed away when Marie was 10). They were also unusually good students due to their father’s tutoring; They spent Saturday nights studying literature together. Marie and two of her siblings, Bronya and Joseph, graduated at the top of their classes earning “gold medals” at their schools.
Upon graduating from high school, Marie hoped to go to college, but women weren’t allowed to attend The University of Warsaw. If she’d had money, she would have liked to attend the Sorbonne in Paris, but her family was too poor to send her.
Instead, her father arranged for Marie to take a year off by spending time with relatives in the countryside. After a lifetime of responsibility, her year in the country is magical:
“I may say that aside from an hour’s French lesson with a little boy I don’t do a thing, positively not a thing—for I have even abandoned the piece of embroidery that I had started … I have no schedule. I get up sometimes at ten o’clock, sometimes at four or five (morning, not evening!). I read no serious books, only harmless and absurd little novels.… Thus, in spite of the diploma conferring on me the dignity and maturity of a person who has finished her studies, I feel incredibly stupid. Sometimes I laugh all by myself, and I contemplate my state of total stupidity with genuine satisfaction.
We go out in a band to walk in the woods, we roll hoops, we play battledore and shuttlecock (at which I am very bad!), cross-tag, the game of Goose, and many equally childish things. There have been so many wild strawberries here that one could buy a really sufficient amount for a few groszy—and by that I mean a big plateful heaped high. Alas, the season is over!… But I am afraid that when I get back my appetite will be unlimited and my voracity alarming.” (Letter from Marie to her friend Kazia)
Marie returns after her year of respite and conceives a plan to help send her older sister Bronya to University in Paris. If they both put their earnings towards Bronya, then Bronya would have just enough money to live in poverty in Paris and to attend medical school. In 5 years, upon graduating medical school, Bronya would then put her earnings towards supporting Marie through school. This meant that it would be 10 years before Marie would graduate. It was a long path towards opportunity but their options were limited and Marie was determined.
In order for the plan to work, Marie would have to get a better-paying role as a governess in the countryside. She would have to leave her father and friends in Warsaw, for years.
She taught in a wealthy family’s home, where, although they treated her relatively kindly, it was made clear that she was considered lower class and not afforded the same respect. She almost didn’t make it through this trial. She grew depressed and gave up on her dreams of going to Paris as unrealistic. When Bronya sent for her a few years later, she at first said she no longer wanted to come, that the money should instead go to another sibling, Joseph.
Luckily, after a few months she found hope again and decided to go to Paris. (Those few months of depression, and the weight of the sacrifices she had taken on for her family, might have changed the course of history…)
To be continued…