Lydia Davis - Samuel Johnson Is Indignant

“It’s extraordinary ,” says one woman.

“It is extraordinary,” says the other.

Woman of pride, passion, and labor, who was actress of her time because she had the ambition of her means and the means of her ambition, actress of ours, finally, since between Marie and atomic force, the filiation is direct.

Besides, she died of it.

From birth, Marie possesses the three dispositions that make brilliant subjects, cherished by professors: memory, power of concentration, and appetite for learning.

“My heart breaks when I think of my spoiled aptitudes which, all the same, had to be worth something…”

Then what? The “ordinary destiny of women”? She never imagined making it her own.

But in the chalet of Zakopane where she lingers, alone, in September 1891, walking her melancholy under the great black pines of the Carpathians, dragging a grippe that does not finish, one man, Casimir, could take her away. And a part of herself hopes.

In two months she will be twenty-four years.

She is poor. She is not yet beautiful. For all diploma she has the Polish baccalaureate. Why would she become “someone”? Besides, she loves Casimir, and waits for him.

Four years have not cooled the sentiments of the young man, probably exalted on the contrary by the obstacle…And he has lost nothing of his charm…

What he does not know, when he mentions their shared future, is that he now has a rival. And what a rival! A laboratory.

Where does she come from, this nervous young woman, who curiously combines timidity and assurance? It is a daughter of the earth, who has need of air, space, trees. She entertains with nature a relationship that is almost carnal. The plants know it and under her fingers blossom.

What she denies, on the other hand, is her animal part. Her brief angers, for example, which betray like a bolt of lightning what she is controlling in the way of concealed storms.

Now, however, her father is deprived of his attributions, loses the lodging that accompanies them and half of his appointments.

How to join the two ends?

He gnaws at himself. Ah!

What afflicts her is not that she has only one dress which must be made over by a seamstress but that she does not see any way out of the tunnel in which she is engaged.

Then she is rescued by her sister.

French science, whose milk Marie Sklodowska has come to Paris to suck, happily has one great man, Pasteur, who is reaching the end of his life.

In Paris, she will spend her leisure time with her sister Bronia and Bronia’s own Casimir. Though they work hard they know how to amuse themselves, with Slavic hospitality. There are infinite discussions around the samovar and the piano in which they remake the world.

They organize parties, put on amateur spectacles, tableaux vivants: a young woman draped in a garnet tunic, her blond hair falling over her shoulders, incarnates Poland breaking its bonds while Paderewski plays Chopin in the wings: it’s Marie, proud of having been chosen.

But chatting pleasantly will never be her specialty.

Her austerity sometimes borders on masochism. One night she is so cold in her fireless little room that she piles on her bed everything contained in her trunk along with a chair, while the water freezes in her basin.

She sometimes faints from having fed herself exclusively on radishes and tea. Bronia and Casimir rescue her and a cure of beefsteak puts her to rights.

A summer passes. She perfects her French. When classes resume, she has driven out all the “Polishisms” from her vocabulary. Only the gently rolled r’s will bear witness until her last day to her Slavic origins, adding a certain charm to her voice which does not lack it already. And, like all the world, she will always calculate in her mother tongue.

Not only does she pass her exam, but when the results are announced before all the candidates in order of merit, her name is spoken first. Marie Sklodowska is licensed in physical sciences by the University of Paris. And it is admirable.

Did she even notice, on the eve of her exam, that Sadi Carnot, the President of the Republic, was stabbed in his carriage by an Italian militant anarchist?

Perhaps she did not speak of it, even for an instant, with the physicist she has been seeing for several weeks, and who, as others offer chocolates, has brought her, when he has come to chat with her in her room, the offprint of an article titled “On symmetry in physical phenomena, the symmetry of an electric field and a magnetic field.” The brochure is dedicated “To Mlle Sklodowska with the respect and the friendship of the author P. Curie.”

Together they speak enormously, but about physics or themselves.

And, everyone knows, to tolerate a person telling you about his childhood it is necessary to be in love with him.

Marie has not attained twenty-six years, soon twenty-seven, she has not lived three years in Paris without having met at Bronia’s, at the Faculty, at the laboratory, representatives of the male species sensitive to her attractions. An enamored Polish student had once thought to swallow laudanum to make himself interesting in her eyes. Marie’s reaction: “That young man has no sense of priorities.”

In any case, they did not have the same.

Pierre Curie has come on stage in Marie’s life at the precise moment at which it was suitable that he should appear.

The year 1894 has begun. Marie is assured of obtaining her license in July. She is beginning to look beyond, she is more available, and the spring is beautiful. Pierre is already captive to this singular little blond person.

It is clear that, making his way at once through the realms of the sublime and of theoretical physics, Pierre still finds himself alone at thirty-five years. And Marie Sklodowska very quickly appears to him as the Unique, capable of accompanying him there.

But lofty thinking is ill compensated. At thirty-six years, Pierre Curie earns thirty-six hundred francs per year at the School of Physics.

Marie Curie is over fifty years when she writes lines that describs their first meeting and she is never a woman to express herself, publicly at least, like the Portuguese Nun. But under the convention of the style and the eternal constraint certainly appears a little of what was, it seems, a reciprocal bolt of lightning.

Marie will be perceptibly longer in being convinced that she must alienate her independence, even to this physicist with limpid eyes.

Pierre Curie has said it to her: “Science, is your destiny.” Science, that is to say research pursued for practical ends.

Marie tells, in the stilted book she devotes to him: “Pierre Curie wrote me during the summer of 1894 letters which I think admirable taken as a whole.”

To one, Pierre adds a postscript: “I have shown your photograph to my brother. Was I wrong? He finds you very good. He says: ‘She has a look that is very decided and even stubborn.’”

Stubborn, oh how much!

She, always dressed in gray, gentle yet stern, child-like yet mature, sweet yet uncompromising…the woman from Poland.