Hey, it’s Marie.
So the Pierre situation didn’t go as planned. I was going to keep things professional. Lab space only. Strictly science.
He proposed, and I said no. I was going back to Poland after my degree — my country still needs people, and I didn’t come to Paris to become someone’s wife.
Pierre responded by writing me a letter saying he’d give up everything and follow me to Poland, even if it meant never doing science again, because being near me mattered more than his career.
That’s either the most romantic thing anyone has ever said or the most unhinged... so I married him.
But we didn’t become a married couple who happens to do science. We became a scientific team that happens to be married. There’s a difference. The day after our wedding we got on bicycles and rode through the French countryside. We talked about radiation the entire time. Happiest I’ve ever been.
A few months ago I was studying a mineral called pitchblende. It contains uranium, which gives off radiation — already known. But when I measured the radiation coming off the pitchblende, the numbers were too high. Far too high. More radiation than the uranium inside could possibly account for.
Something else is in there. Something unknown. Something nobody has ever seen. There may be an entirely new element hiding inside this rock — a building block of the universe that no human has ever identified.
Pierre dropped everything the moment I told him. I said “I think I found a new element” and he didn’t blink. He just said “what do you need from me.”
We don’t have a proper laboratory. The Sorbonne won’t give me one — I’m a woman and I’m Polish, and apparently that combination doesn’t deserve a real workspace. What we got instead is a converted shed behind the school. Used to be a medical dissecting room. The roof leaks. In summer we can barely breathe. In winter our equipment frosts over. A visiting scientist once said it looked more like a stable than a laboratory.
This is where we’re going to discover a new element.
The work is brutal. Pitchblende is heavy — literally tons of it. I spend my days grinding, boiling, filtering, dissolving massive quantities by hand, trying to isolate whatever is hiding inside. My arms ache, my hands are raw and cracked, the chemicals burn my fingers. Some nights I come home too exhausted to hold a pen.
But the numbers keep getting more interesting. Whatever is in there, we’re closing in.
Last week we isolated something. A new substance giving off radiation far more powerful than uranium. We’ve confirmed it — it’s an element nobody’s ever documented.
I named it Polonium. After Poland. My country that doesn’t exist on any map right now. The country that told me women can’t learn. I put its name on the periodic table.
We’re not done. The numbers say there’s something else in the pitchblende — something even more active than Polonium. We’re going to keep going until we find it.
Pierre says I’m working too hard. He’s probably right, but I don’t care. I came to Paris with nothing. I fainted in libraries from hunger. I learned physics in kitchens. And now I’m pulling new elements out of the earth in a leaking shed.
If you think your study conditions are bad — I’m rewriting chemistry in a room that used to hold dead bodies.
— Marie
