CHAPTER VII

THE NATION'S SORROW. THE LABORATORIES: "SACRED PLACES"

I shall not attempt to describe the grief of the family left by Pierre Curie. By what I have earlier said in this narrative one can understand what he meant to his father, his brother, and his wife. He was, too, a devoted father, tender in his love for his children, and happy to occupy himself with them. But our daughters were still too young at this time to realize the calamity that had befallen us. Their grandfather and I, united in our common suffering, did what we could to see that their childhood should not be too much darkened by the disaster.

The news of the catastrophe caused veritable consternation in the scientific world of France, as well as in that of other countries. The heads of the university and the professors expressed their emotion in letters full of sympathy, and a great number of foreign scientists also sent letters and telegrams. No less deep was the impression produced on the public with whom Pierre Curie, despite his reserve, enjoyed great renown. This feeling was expressed in numerous private letters coming not only from those whom we knew, but also from persons entirely unknown to us. At the same time the press printed articles of regret, bearing the stamp of deep sincerity. The French government sent its condolences, and a few rulers of foreign countries sent their personal expressions of sympathy. One of the purest glories of France had been extinguished, and each understood that this was a nation's sorrow.[14]

Faithful to the memory of him who had left us, we wished a simple interment in the family vault in the little cemetery at Sceaux. There was neither official ceremony nor address, and only his friends accompanied him to his last home. As he thought of him who was no more, his brother Jacques said to me: "He had all the gifts; there were not two like him."

In order to assure the continuance of his work, the Faculty of Sciences of Paris paid me the very great honor of asking me to take the place that he had occupied. I accepted this heavy heritage, in the hope that I might build up some day, in his memory, a laboratory worthy of him, which he had never had, but where others would be able to work to develop his idea. This hope is now partly realized, thanks to the common initiative of the University and the Pasteur Institute, which have aimed at the creation of a Radium Institute, composed of two laboratories, the Curie and the Pasteur, destined for the physicochemical and the biological study of radium rays. In touching homage to him who had disappeared the new street leading to the Institute was named rue Pierre Curie.

This Institute is, however, insufficient in view of the considerable development of radioactivity and of its therapeutic applications. The best authorized persons now recognize that France must possess a Radium Institute comparable to those of England and America for the _Curietherapie_ which has become an efficacious means in the battle against cancer. It is to be hoped that with generous and far-seeing aid, we shall have, in a few years, a Radium Institute complete and enlarged, worthy of our country.

To honor the memory of Pierre Curie, the French Society of Physics decided to issue a complete publication of his works. This publication, arranged by P. Langevin and C. Cheneveau, comprises but a single volume of about 600 pages, which appeared in 1908, and for which I wrote a preface. This unique volume, which includes a work as important as it is varied, is a faithful reflection of the mentality of the author. One finds in it a great richness of ideas and of experimental facts leading to clear and well-established results, but the exposition is limited to the strictly necessary, and is irreproachable, one might even say classical, in form. It is to be regretted that Pierre Curie did not use his gifts as scientist and author in writing extended memoirs or books. It was not the desire that was lacking; he had several cherished projects of this nature. But he could never put them into execution because of the difficulties with which he had to struggle during all his working life.

And now, let us glance at this narrative as a whole, in which I have attempted to evoke the image of a man who, inflexibly devoted to the service of his ideal, honored humanity by an existence lived in silence, in the simple grandeur of his genius and his character. He had the faith of those who open new ways. He knew that he had a high mission to fulfil and the mystic dream of his youth pushed him invincibly beyond the usual path of life into a way which he called anti-natural because it signified the renunciation of the pleasures of life. Nevertheless, he resolutely subordinated his thoughts and desires to this dream, adapting himself to it and identifying himself with it more and more completely. Believing only in the pacific might of science and of reason, he lived for the search of truth. Without prejudice or _parti pris_, he carried the same loyalty into his study of things that he used in his understanding of other men and of himself. Detached from every common passion, seeking neither supremacy nor honors, he had no enemies, even though the effort he had achieved in the control of himself had made of him one of those elect whom we find in advance of their time in all the epochs of civilization. Like them he was able to exercise a profound influence merely by the radiation of his inner strength.

It is useful to learn how much sacrifice such a life represents. The life of a great scientist in his laboratory is not, as many may think, a peaceful idyll. More often it is a bitter battle with things, with one's surroundings, and above all with oneself. A great discovery does not leap completely achieved from the brain of the scientist, as Minerva sprang, all panoplied, from the head of Jupiter; it is the fruit of accumulated preliminary work. Between the days of fecund productivity are inserted days of uncertainty when nothing seems to succeed, and when even matter itself seems hostile; and it is then that one must hold out against discouragement. Thus without ever forsaking his inexhaustible patience, Pierre Curie used sometimes to say to me: "It is nevertheless hard, this life that we have chosen."

For the admirable gift of himself, and for the magnificent service he renders humanity, what reward does our society offer the scientist? Have these servants of an idea the necessary means of work? Have they an assured existence, sheltered from care? The example of Pierre Curie, and of others, shows that they have none of these things; and that more often, before they can secure possible working conditions, they have to exhaust their youth and their powers in daily anxieties. Our society, in which reigns an eager desire for riches and luxury, does not understand the value of science. It does not realize that science is a most precious part of its moral patrimony. Nor does it take sufficient cognizance of the fact that science is at the base of all the progress that lightens the burden of life and lessens its suffering. Neither public powers nor private generosity actually accord to science and to scientists the support and the subsidies indispensable to fully effective work.

I invoke, in closing, the admirable pleading of Pasteur:

"If the conquests useful for humanity touch your heart, if you are overwhelmed before the astonishing results of electric telegraphy, of the daguerrotype, of anesthesia, and of other wonderful discoveries, if you are jealous of the part your country may claim in the spreading of these marvelous things, take an interest, I beg of you, in those sacred places to which we give the expressive name of laboratories. Demand that they be multiplied and ornamented, for these are the temples of the future, of wealth, and of well-being. It is in them that humanity grows, fortifies itself, and becomes better. There it may learn to read in the works of nature the story of progress and of universal harmony, even while its own creations are too often those of barbarism, fanaticism, and destruction."

May this truth be widely spread, and deeply penetrate public opinion, that the future may be less hard for the pioneers who must open up new domains for the general good of humanity.

_Extracts from Published Appreciations_

I have chosen certain extracts from various published appreciations of Pierre Curie in order to complete my account by a few moving testimonies from eminent men of science.

_Henri Poincaré_:

"Curie was one of those on whom Science and France believed they had the right to count. His age permitted far-reaching hopes; what he had already given seemed a promise, and we knew that, living, he would not have failed. On the night preceding his death (pardon this personal memory) I sat next to him and he talked with me of his plans and his ideas. I admired the fecundity and the depth of his thought, the new aspect which physical phenomena took on when looked at through that original and lucid mind. I felt that I better understood the grandeur of human intelligence--and the following day, in an instant, all was annihilated. A stupid accident brutally reminded us how little place thought holds in the face of the thousand blind forces that hurl themselves across the world without knowing whither they go, crushing all in their passage.

"His friends, his colleagues understood at once the import of the loss they suffered, but the grief extended far beyond them. In foreign countries the most illustrious scientists joined in trying to show the esteem in which they held our compatriot, while in our own land there was no Frenchman, however ignorant, who did not feel more or less vaguely what a force his nation and humanity had lost.

"Curie brought to his study of physical phenomena I do not know what very fine sense which made him divine unsuspected analogies, and made it possible for him to orient himself in a labyrinth of complex appearances where others would have gone astray.... True physicists, like Curie, neither look within themselves, nor on the surface of things, but they know how to look through things.

"All those who knew him knew their pleasure and surety in his acquaintance, and the delicate charm that was exhaled, one might say, by his gentle modesty, by his naïve directness, by the fineness of his spirit. Always ready to efface himself before his family, before his friends, and even before his rivals, he was what one calls a 'poor candidate'; but in our democracy candidates are the least thing we lack.

"Who would have thought that so much gentleness concealed an intransigeant soul? He did not compromise with those general principles on which he was nourished, nor with the particular moral ideal he had been taught to love, that ideal of absolute sincerity, too high, perhaps, for the world in which we live. He did not know the thousand little accommodations with which our weakness contents itself. Moreover, he never separated the worship of this ideal from what he rendered to science, and he gave us a shining example of the high conception of duty that may spring from a simple and pure love of truth. It matters little in what God he believed; it is not the God, but faith, that performs miracles."

_Institut de France_: Written about P. Curie by M. D. Gernez.

"All for work, all for science: this sums up the life of Pierre Curie, a life so rich in brilliant discoveries and in the outlook of genius that it won him practically universal admiration. In the full maturity of his investigations whose progress he so eagerly pursued his work was ended, to the consternation of us all, by a terrible catastrophe on the 19th of April, 1906....

"All these honors did not dazzle him; he was and he will remain a remarkable figure among those who make the scientific history of our epoch. His contemporaries found in him a precious example of a devotion to science at once unyielding and disinterested. There have been few lives more pure and more justly famous."

_Jean Perrin_:

"Pierre Curie, whom all called a master, and whom we had the joy to call, too, our friend, died suddenly in the fullness of his powers.... We will try to show through him, as an example, what part a powerful genius can return to sincerity, to liberty, to the strong and calm audacity of thought which nothing can enchain and nothing can astonish. We acknowledge also all the greatness of the soul where these fine qualities of intelligence and character were united in a most noble unselfishness and most exquisite goodness.

"Those who have known Pierre Curie, know that, near him one felt awaken the need to do and to understand. We will try to honor his memory by spreading abroad this impression, and we will ask his pale and beautiful face for the secret of that radiation which made all those who approached him better men."

_C. Cheneveau_:

"... In order to realize our irreparable loss we must remember Curie's attachment to his students.... Some of us offered him, with reason, a veritable worship.... For myself, he was, next to my own family, one of those I loved most. How well he knew how to surround his simple collaborator with a great and tender affection. His immense kindness extended even to his most humble helpers, who adored him. I have never seen more sincere and more heart-breaking tears than those shed by the laboratory boys on the news of his sudden death."

_Paul Langevin_:

"... The hours when one could meet him and in which one loved to talk about his science and in which one thought with him, return each day to recall his memory, to bring back his kindly and thoughtful face, his luminous eyes and his beautiful, expressive head modeled by twenty-five years passed in the laboratory, and by a life of unremittent work and complete simplicity.

"... It is in his laboratory that my memories, still so recent, most readily bring him back to me, as he would appear to those near to whom he had grown older, scarcely changed by the eighteen years that have passed since. Timid and often awkward, I began under him my laboratory education....

"Surrounded by apparatus for the greater part conceived or modified by himself, he manipulated it with extreme dexterity, with the familiar gestures of the long white hands of the physicist....

"He was twenty-nine years old when I entered as a student. The mastery which ten years, passed entirely in the laboratory, had given him, imposed itself even on us, despite our ignorance, by the surety of his movements and explanations, and the ease, shaded by timidity, of his manner. We returned always with joy to the laboratory, where it was good to work near him because we felt him working near to us in that large, light room filled with apparatus whose forms were still a little mysterious to us. We did not fear to enter it often to consult him, and he sometimes admitted us, too, to perform some particularly delicate manipulation. Probably my finest memories of my school years are those of moments passed there standing before the blackboard where he took pleasure in talking with us, in awakening in us fruitful ideas, and in discussions of research which formed our taste for the things of science. His live and contagious curiosity, the fullness and surety of his information made him an admirable awakener of spirits."

I have wished above all, in gathering together here these few memories, in a bouquet reverently placed upon his tomb, to help, if I can, to fix the image of a man truly great in character and in thought, of a wonderful representative of the genius of our race. Entirely unfranchised from ancient servitudes, and passionately loving reason and clarity, he was an example--as is a prophet inspired by truths of the future--of what may be realized in moral beauty and goodness by a free and upright spirit, of constant courage, and of a mental honesty which made him repulse what he did not understand, and place his life in accord with this dream.

[Footnote 14: From the great number of letters and telegrams of condolence, I quote, as examples, these lines written by three great scientists, today no longer living.

From M. Berthelot:

"MADAME:

"I do not wish to wait longer without sending you the sympathetic expression of my profound grief and of that of French and foreign scientists on the occasion of the common loss with you that we have all experienced. We were struck as by lightning by the tragic news! So many services already rendered science and humanity, so many services that we awaited from that genial inventor: all this vanished in an instant, or become already but a memory!"

From G. Lippmann:

"MADAME:

It is while traveling, and very late, that I receive the terrible news. I feel as if I had lost a brother; I did not know by what close ties I was attached to your husband. I know today. I suffer also for you, Madame. Believe in my sincere and respectful devotion."

From Lord Kelvin:

"Grievously distressed by terrible news of Curie's death. When will be funeral. We arrive Hotel Mirabeau tomorrow morning. Kelvin, Villa St. Martin, Cannes."]

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES MARIE CURIE

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