Hey, it’s Marie.
I need you to know the truth before the newspapers finish burying me.
A few years have passed since Pierre died. I kept working, kept teaching. I isolated pure radium — the second element I discovered, even more powerful than Polonium. I proved it existed beyond any doubt and documented its properties so precisely that no one can question it. I did this alone, in the same leaking shed, with the same cracked hands.
And then I made a mistake. Or at least that’s what they’re calling it.
I became close with a physicist named Paul Langevin. He’s brilliant, he was a student of Pierre’s, and he’s married.
I’m not going to pretend this was simple. His marriage was already falling apart long before I was involved, but none of that matters now because his wife found letters I wrote to him — private letters — and gave them to the newspapers. They printed all of them.
Overnight, everything changed. I went from being the brilliant Madame Curie to the Polish homewrecker. The foreign seductress. They’re calling me a husband-stealer, a threat to French families. One newspaper put my letters on the front page and asked whether a woman like me should be allowed to teach French students. A woman like me. I’ve given this country two new elements and a Nobel Prize and they’re calling me “a woman like me.”
It got worse. A mob showed up at my house — a real mob, throwing things, screaming at my windows. My daughters were inside. I had to take them out through a back entrance and I couldn’t go home for days.
The French Academy of Sciences held a vote on whether to admit me as a member. I have a Nobel Prize, I’ve discovered two elements, I have more accomplishments than most of the men in that room combined. They voted no, because I’m a woman.
And then, right in the middle of all this — the newspapers, the mob, the Academy rejecting me — I received word from Stockholm. The Nobel Committee awarded me a second Nobel Prize. In chemistry this time, a completely different field from my first. No one’s ever done this before.
The Committee then sent me a private note suggesting that perhaps, given the scandal, it might be better if I didn’t come to the ceremony in person. For everyone’s comfort. I wrote back and told them I’d be there.
The most prestigious scientific award on earth was given to me for the second time in history and their first instinct was to ask me not to show up because a married man’s wife is upset with me.
I went to Stockholm. I put on my dress, walked into that ceremony in front of every scientist, diplomat, and journalist in the room, and accepted my prize. I gave my lecture. I didn’t mention the scandal, didn’t acknowledge the newspapers, didn’t address the mob that had been at my door two weeks earlier. I talked about radium. Because that’s what matters. That’s the only thing that’s ever mattered.
France can hate me. The Academy can reject me. Newspapers can print whatever they want. None of them discovered Polonium. None of them discovered Radium. None of them have two Nobel Prizes.
I do. And no mob, no newspaper, and no vote of old men in a room is ever going to take that from me.
I’ll write again soon. I need to get back to work.
— Marie
