Marie & Pierre Curie | Love, Partnership and Radioactivity with Lauren Redniss

Welcome to another episode of Past Loves - the history podcast that explores affection, infatuation and attachment across time.

This week I am joined by author and artist, Lauren Redniss, to discuss the love story between Marie and Pierre Curie.

From Marie's early commitment to pursing education to the infamous story around the couple's Nobel Prize win, we delve into the personal and professional lives of Marie and Pierre. Theirs was a great love story and  intellectual partnership which resulted in scientific discoveries that changed our understanding of the world, though Marie once said: “There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life."

Their romance is was, however, the epitome of close professional collaboration. They were creative, passionate and driven to develop scientific knowledge. Their commitment to endless back-breaking work with pitchblende in a draughty shed to extract radium salts was quite remarkable. And yet, as a couple, their work changed the world in ways that continue to have palpable ramifications today. Here is the story of Nobel Prize winners Marie and Pierre Curie.

Where To Find Us

Buy Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Lauren-Redniss/Radioactive--Marie--Pierre-Curie-A-Tale-of-Love-and-Fallout/17248977

Find out more about Lauren: http://laurenredniss.com/

Follow Lauren on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenredniss/

Follow Past Loves on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pastlovespodcast/

If Past Loves has become your current love, you can email me at pastlovespodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

Holly: Hello darlings and welcome back to Past Loves – the history podcast that explores affection, infatuation and attachment across time to add a touch of romance to daily life. I’m Holly, your true romantic host, and welcome to the last episode of the season. 

2020 was obviously quite the year and I released both season 1 and 2 of the podcast in that year. So yes, this season, season 3 of the podcast, has been a lot lot lot more stretched out. But I hope that you’ve enjoyed these latest episodes periodically popping up on your feeds. We’ve managed to cover quite a range of love stories from the fifteenth-century romance between Elizabeth Woodville and Edward IV to the love story of a couple of iconic Victorians, Benjamin and Mary Anne Disraeli. In these episodes, we have been able to explore the research which has revealed these stories to us (like Daisy Hay’s research into Benjamin and Marie Anne and Isobel Staton’s new insight into Gawthorpe Hall’s archive on Selina and Lawrence Kay-Shuttleworth) as well as more unheard stories such as the relationship between Edith Craig, Christopher St. John and Tony Atwood. 

It really has been such a joy to talk to each and every one of my guests over the season about these romances and this week was no different. Bringing us the love story between Marie and Pierre Curie is the truly lovely Lauren Redniss. Lauren is an author and artist. She has crafted several works of visual non-fiction and was the recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2016.

One such work of visual non-fiction is her book Radioactive about Marie and Pierre Curie. As a finalist for the National Book Award, Radioactive combines art and written narrative to tell the story of the Curies – from their intellectual partnership to love story and lasting legacy – in the most vivid way. It is a stunning work of visual non-fiction about the power of two invisible forces: radioactivity and love. 

Of course, in many ways and importantly, Marie and Pierre’s scientific work proceeds them. But, it was a pleasure to be able to delve a little deeper into the people and love story behind these titans of science… 

Welcome, Lauren, and thank you so much for joining me today.

Lauren: Thank you so much for having me.

Holly: So we’re going to talk about Marie and Pierre, but I really wanted to start with Marie Curie because I find her absolutely fascinating. How would you describe her as a person?

Lauren: One of the first words that comes to mind is determined. I think she showed exceptional perseverance throughout her life in really everything she did, from her scientific work to her relationships and to being a parent. I think that she was sort of unfailingly focused and encountered significant obstacles throughout her life, beginning from the time she was a small child, which I imagine we’ll get into. But I think that set the stage for her modus operandi of working through those obstacles, never letting something, even something really really daunting, stop her from pursuing her goals.

Holly: Absolutely and pursue her goals she did. Shall we talk about her childhood a little bit? Who were her parents? Because I think that’s obviously really formative for her.

Lauren: Right, so her father was a teacher and her mother died before she was eleven, and she also lost a sister to tuberculosis. So of course, you can imagine how that shapes a child. She was the youngest of six children and they lived in Russian occupied Poland. So when she went to school, even though her family, her parents were very passionate about the Polish language and Polish culture, she was not allowed to speak in Polish at school. There was a periodic inspection, Russian inspectors would come by and make the children recite the names of the Russian tsars. There was always this sort of tension around her education even.

Holly: Yeah,  because her education is obviously…I always ask the question about education because I think it’s so formative…but for Marie, and Pierre who will come to, their educations are obviously the things that absolutely then go on to define who they become. So what kind of education did she receive?

Lauren: And I think this is another kind of pattern that we see throughout her life. In order to get an education, she had to kind of defy the authorities. For instance, she studied in secret with her uncle, then later on in a kind of clandestine lab, and then later on in what’s been ultimately translated as a floating university or the flying university – a group of women, about 1000 women, who were working in secret to defy the Russian authorities. And it had this name because they would change locations all the time so they couldn’t be detected. But, even though she had to defy the kind of state authorities, she always had the support of her family and education, I think, was very, very important in her family and educating the girls was very important. And so early on, she had this determination that was supported by her family. Her older sister went on to become a doctor. She and her sister made a pact at a certain point because they didn’t have the money for a formal education. So they said, ‘okay, you work as a governess for a few years (that Marie, who is at that time called Manya), you work as a governess for a few years, send Bronya (the sister) to Paris to go attend the Sorbonne. And then Bronya will raise that money and send for Marie.’ And they in fact followed through on that.

Holly: I loved that pact that they made together. It was so interesting to see them finding ways to still get these educations and I think 1000 women in the floating/flying university sounds like quite the logistical nightmare to be moving around. 

Lauren: I can only imagine.

Holly: But good on them. So she got to Paris and Paris is obviously key to meeting Pierre. So do we know how or when or where they met?

Lauren: So she was one of only 23 girls enrolled in the Sorbonne and again, you can read her diaries and she describes this period of her life and the kind of austerity. She lived in this walk up garret with really no heat. She describes having to pile all her bed clothes on her to try to get a night’s sleep and bringing coal up the stairs and having very little to eat. But she was very happy. She describes those years and those months as very happy because she knew she was pursuing her studies. And at a certain point, she was working in the lab of a physicist named Gabriel Lippmann. She had space in his lab. He went on to win the Nobel Prize later and she felt cramped. There wasn’t that much space in his lab. And she mentioned this to a Polish physicist and it turns out that scientist also knew Pierre Curie. And he said this, ‘I know this other guy, he might have space for you.’ So he ends up introducing them and they hit it off.

Holly: What do you think might have attracted them to each other?

Lauren: Pierre, at this time, he’s 35 years old, he’s still living at home. He had an early heartbreak – the details of which are kind of lost to history – but that woman that he loved, under circumstances that I don’t know about and as far as I know aren’t documented, she died. It seems to have made him swear off love. He wrote in his journals like, ‘this isn’t happening, I’m going to live like a priest.’ And he basically describes the belief that a lover will get in the way of a man’s pursuit of serious work of science. But then he meets Marie and suddenly he sees in her someone who can be a true partner, a true intellectual collaborator. And she’s actually not on board right off the bat. She has her ideas and her ambitions, and she’s also very committed to her family back in Poland. So she’s kind of hesitant about getting involved with this French guy. So it takes him a while to persuade her that their scientific dream, as he describes it, is such a worthy pursuit and they can do this together in a way that they can’t do it on their own, and they need to do this together and eventually he persuades her.

Holly: So was that one of the reasons why she initially rejected his proposal, because she wanted to go back to Poland?

Lauren: I think she’s very devoted to her father, who was in Warsaw. And yes, this idea of returning to Poland, I think, was really something that she seems to have imagined as her future and then suddenly she has to reimagine her future in France, making a life with Pierre. Through a series of very ardent letters, he convinced her.

Holly: Maybe we should talk a little bit about who Pierre is. How would you describe him as a person?

Lauren: He seems to have been a very serious person. And again, a quality that they both share seems to be modesty. They are both exceptional achievers from an early age, but the kind of external recognition for their achievements doesn’t seem to be especially important to them. They really are pursuing science for science sake and he talks about that explicitly, as does she. She doesn’t talk about it till later when she starts receiving recognition. And he also has a kind of outsider status somehow, even though he does have this sort of series of early achievements, he’s never quite integrated into the kind of hierarchy of the Sorbonne until much later, really until he wins the Nobel Prize. One last thing that also seems like a similarity, that you feel in their writings, which seems worth mentioning – they both spend a lot of time describing nature and in great and vivid detail, describing fields of flowers and the breeze and this kind of romantic quality seems to be something that they share as well.

Holly: Shall we talk a little bit about Pierre’s childhood, parents Eugène Curie and Sophie-Claire Curie, and the kind of environment he grew up in.

Lauren: Let me be frank, I wrote this book 16 years ago, so some of my recollections on the early parts of my research get a little hazy. His brother was a scientist too and Pierre’s achievements, his just academic achievements by his early teens are evident. He ends up graduating with all kinds of degrees, publishing papers by 14, graduating at 16.

Holly: Yeah. I thought it was amazing to hear that he had the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree by 16 and equivalent of a masters by 18, which is very very impressive.

Lauren: And I think it was more common in those days right? I think people usually pushed through education systems at a kind of quicker pace. But obviously this was not just some average student.

Holly: Yeah. Okay. So they’ve both been highly educated. They’re in the lab. He’s persuaded her to stay in Paris with him. They finally get engaged. Can you describe their wedding and particularly their honeymoon.

Lauren: So I think their wedding and their honeymoon is very much in keeping with their personalities. It was very modest. They went to City Hall. She wore a blue suit and a striped blouse, and then they went off on their bicycles with their handlebars festooned with flowers. In her diary, she describes the coasts of Brittany and the beautiful places where they ride their bikes and then this became something that they would do together, just go for bike rides in the countryside. And I think it was just very peaceful and intimate and idyllic.

Holly: and I guess links back into that love of nature that you were talking about earlier.

Lauren: Exactly.

Holly: And am I right in thinking that she had her blue dress so that she could keep wearing it into the lab and everything, or is that kind of an old myth that circulates?

Lauren: Well she definitely was parsimonious, or at least minimal, in her wardrobe. She seems to only have possessed a very, very few dresses throughout her time, and that was never a focus. So she was very practical, and I think re-wearing the clothes would have been assumed.

Holly: When do they start researching together and kind of how does that professional relationship start to develop?

Lauren: Well, I imagine that conversation would have started immediately. That was the bond, that was the connection. So I imagine that they were always discussing their work and their ideas and what they were looking into in their research. But Pierre’s focus at that point, he was studying crystals. He had made certain innovations in something called Piezoelectricity. He studied the symmetries in crystals and the way that if you pressed a crystal along these certain axes, you would get an electric charge and so, he was developing that sort of realm and field of knowledge. And Marie, in the meantime, was working in other directions and eventually persuaded him to join her. So I love that because later it becomes by some of their distractors characterised as, ‘oh, this is Pierre’s research, and she was almost like his assistant or some other secondary character.’ But in fact, she was like, ‘hey, you need to drop what you’re doing and come work with me.’ 

Holly: And he did.

Lauren. And he did. His tools that he was working on end up being really critical to the discoveries that they made. So it’s very very much a true partnership, but yes, it was the direction of her research that they pursued together.

Holly: What was the initial result of their starting to work together?

Lauren: Well a scientist named Henri Becquerel had been studying…well as in science always right, it’s always a sort of series of discoveries right? Different people pick up on the work of a previous researcher. So just to begin, maybe with Becquerel – this is a very shorthand, Cliffs Notes version – he leaves a uranium nugget (I guess at this point, right no one understood, you had uranium nuggets lying around in your lab). He closed a drawer that had photographic plates in it, with this rock of uranium on top of it, leaves it, comes back and it appears as though these photographic plates have been exposed to some kind of brilliant light. So he understands that the uranium has had an effect on the photographic plates. He publishes this observation. He knows something is afoot here, but he doesn’t really pursue the underlying implications. Marie Curie reads about this and she says, ‘there’s something here. I want to look into this.’

Holly: And so that led to the discovery of what exactly?

Lauren: So Marie Curie, to make a long story short, what they end up proving is that radiation is an atomic property and that knowledge gives them the capacity to identify new elements in the periodic table, to literally expand the periodic table, which they do through the discovery of radium and polonium. And what they need to do is to – first they test. Marie tests all kinds of substances for radioactive qualities and compares any radioactive effect that they have to uranium and eventually she comes to test a mineral called pitchblende, which is from ceramic mines that’s been gathered as a waste product of ceramic mines on the Czech-German border in what was then known as Bohemia. And so she tests this and she said, ‘well the radioactivity that’s registering here is much greater than we’ve seen previously, much greater than uranium. What could it be? How could that be true?’ She makes sure it’s not an error and her tests are unable to give any other answer than, through the power of deduction, every other test is showing her that, this could only be some heretofore unnamed, extremely radioactive substance. So they prove that, and then subsequent to that, they are pushed by the scientific community to actually show it. ‘What is that? We need to see it. It’s not enough that you’ve proved it with this data. You need to give us a sample. What is the substance that’s emitting this level of radioactivity?’ Which is, in the meantime, a word that she has coined. And so, through an extraordinarily laborious four year process, they distil…

Holly: It seemed like so much hard work with that pitchblende.

Lauren: I think it was insane. Yeah. And again, just an example of this single-mindedness and determination that they take seven tons of this mountain of rubble and they need a lab. They don’t even have a space to work and sort of grudgingly, the Sorbonne is like, ‘oh okay, you can have this kind of abandoned shed that was previously used for human dissection.’ It’s very draughty. There’s no insulation. They’re freezing in the winter. They’re boiling in the summer. And the lack of the sort of dilapidated nature of the shed ends up probably saving their lives because the draughtiness may have allowed sufficient air circulation to save their health a little bit.

Holly: Gosh, I hadn’t thought about the natural ventilation of the shed. Just imagining those two working together in that kind of environment, doing properly physical work, breaking down the pitchblende.

Lauren: I think she sort of insisted on doing that side of it, the really physical side of it. I think she had something to prove. She knew she was one of the sole women working in this man’s world, and she was going to prove her worth and she was going to make it very very clear that she deserved to be there.

Holly: Yeah. And she, they, did manage to extract a very very very small amount of radium salts, didn’t they after four years did you say?

Lauren: A 10th of a gram.

Holly: A 10th of a gram!

Lauren: Yeah. It glowed in the dark and they were entranced. They said that they would come back to the lab at night just to watch their samples glow like fairy lights.

Holly: Wow. Yes. Fairly dangerous fairy lights.

Lauren: Right which they didn’t fully understand just yet.

Holly: So it was this discovery that led to the Nobel Prize, can you tell me the story around the Nobel Prize, especially for them as a couple, because it’s a fairly defining part of their story, isn’t it?

Lauren: Yeah, so at first the Nobel committee wanted to award the prize just to Pierre. They sent a letter and they said, ‘Congratulations, Pierre Curie.’ He wrote them back and he said, ‘no, my wife is an equal part of this work.’ And he insisted that she be named as a full collaborator, a full co-equal in that award. But they would have happily excluded her. It was a difficult period for their life because their health was already beginning to show the effects of the radiation exposure. She had just suffered a miscarriage. She wasn’t able to travel to Sweden with him at that time, and he was the one who made the speech. But history records her…it’s interesting because he dies three years later (and I’m sure we’ll get to those dramatic circumstances) but I think, during those early years of their marriage or those years of their early kind of public recognition, he is getting more credit. But because then he later dies, historically she is sort of the more recognised figure in the couple.

Holly: Yeah. That’s very interesting and really it’s a testament to their relationship, how much he fights for her to have the recognition that she deserves. How did life change for them after their Nobel Prize win?

Lauren: Well they were kind of quiet, modest people, and I think they were very happy to work. They really loved their work. They loved those hours together in the lab. And the public recognition, I think, was quite overwhelming and they felt derailed intellectually and distracted, and that it was kind of a nonsense that they had to put up with. They both seemed kind of annoyed by it. There’s a lot of letters that both of them wrote. At one point, Marie (this is later but it’s the same idea) she writes to her daughter, comparing herself to the American boxer Jack Dempsey like their fame was the same. They both get this kind of notoriety. But what does it mean? It’s kind of all nonsense.

Holly: Yeah. And so you mentioned their daughter and, however much we can talk about their professional life, I would also like to talk about their personal lives and their family life. So throughout this time, what did family life look like for them?

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting because I think that they were both very devoted to their children. They had two daughters. Irène was the older, and then Ève was the younger daughter, and then between them, Marie had at least one miscarriage. And Marie would rush home from the lab at midday to nurse, and she would rush home in the end of the day to cook. So she still had these kind of gendered responsibilities within the home, even as she was this recognised scientist in the professional world. So she’s juggling, you know?

Holly: Yeah and how did conventional society perceive them as parents thinking about spending this amount of time together in the lab, away from their children, especially Marie at the time? 

Lauren: My read of it is that public perception has a kind of wave that correlates to other events in their life, whether it’s positive or whether it’s negative. It seems that as long as she was with Pierre in this kind of traditional structure, it seems that she wasn’t really too bothered by public perception. But as soon as he dies and her life goes in other directions, that’s when the public pounces and begins to vilify her. I was going to mention just two other things that I think also flesh out this picture. One is Pierre’s father was very involved in the childcare of the girls. So I think that’s like a really lovely and significant detail that helps illustrate the way that their families supported their relationship and they’re kind of somewhat unconventional power dynamics. And also that they created a kind of home-schooling with all kinds of other eminent scientists and other intellectuals in the community in Paris at that time. But there’s also one other kind of rewind story that when she was back in Poland – this is something that’s not publicly known, as far as I’m aware – but after I published this book, I received an email from the great-grand niece of Marie Curie’s first boyfriend.

Holly: What an amazing email to receive.

Lauren: Oh, I was absolutely stunned to get this letter. And what she told me was that when Marie was a governess in the countryside outside Warsaw, during those years that she was raising money to send her sister Bronya to Paris, she was the governess of children whose elder brother was away at university and when he came home, they fell in love. Apparently the family didn’t approve of them getting married, but she was lower class they considered. She’s a working class girl, they had “higher expectations”, quote, unquote for their son. And so they forbid the marriage. But what I learned from his descendant was that they kept in touch their whole life and long after she had moved to Paris, long after she was the world-renowned scientist, double Nobel Prize winner, she would write him and he would help her with mathematical questions and investigations that related to her work. So I think it’s so significant to me because even as a teenager, she was finding intellectual collaborators.

Holly: Yes.

Lauren: So those partnerships, her relationships were always partnerships as equals, and they were always kind of ahead of their time in terms of gender relationships.

Holly: Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about whether you thought it was a marriage of equals between her and Pierre, because I mean what we see from the societal cues of the jobs that he got post Nobel Prize, which perhaps you can go a bit into, and how she was treated post Nobel Prize, externally there seems to be a difference in how they were received.

Lauren: Yeah, I think that’s right. As you indicate, after they won the Nobel Prize in 1903, he was finally given a professorship. So this is somewhat belated in what would be a kind of typical academic course of achievement. He was always, like we were saying, felt a little like an outsider and left out and not receiving the acknowledgement that his work seemed to merit. He finally gets a professorship and she doesn’t. So the external world is following this script that the man has done the work and she’s his wife. But I think within their relationship, those weren’t the dynamics, but they still lived in the world of the late Nineteenth, early Twentieth Century.

Holly: Yeah, they were constrained by that society that they were living in. So should we talk about the fact that it was after a family holiday that Pierre died. How did it happen?

Lauren: They had just had a beautiful holiday in the countryside, which she describes in her journals, and these kind of sweet moments of relaxing in the sunshine and a butterfly alighting on Irène’s shoulder and just how happy she felt during those moments. And he returns to Paris a few days before the rest of the family because he has some meetings to attend and as he is crossing the Pont Neuf to get from one meeting to another, he is struck by a horse and carriage. His younger daughter, Ève, who later becomes a journalist, describes this moment in a book she publishes later and it’s absolutely gripping and horrific description that she lays out about him being trapped beneath the wheels of the carriage. It’s horrific.

Holly: Yeah. I wrote down the quote, actually from your book from Marie when she found this out because equally really horrific and traumatic for her. And I was going to read it just because it, I think, says a lot about their relationship because she wrote: “your face is sweet, as if you dream. Your lips, which I used to call hungry, are livid and colourless. I kissed your eyelids. We put you in the coffin Saturday morning.” It was just heart-breaking reading her reaction.

Lauren: Yeah. The quote continues to describe how she lets out this kind of primal scream and just says she sounds like a wild animal. And I think we see her there just the raw pain of losing her scientific collaborator, the father of her children, her romantic partner who she calls her best friend. I mean, she’s losing everything in this moment.

Holly: How does her life initially change after his death in 1906?

Lauren: She moves. She and the girls move to be closer to his father. They move just outside of Paris to the town of Sceaux and she sets them up in a garden. I think she makes the effort to make their life beautiful and she also feels it’s important to return to work. She knows that he would want her to return to work and so she does. And within a matter of years, she’s won a second Nobel Prize. She also, after a few years, falls in love again and it’s with a man who has figured in the life of the couple for years. Paul Langevin was the student of Pierre Curie and, as I try to kind of lace through the early chapters of the book, in many different situations, he’s sort of just second to whatever Pierre is doing. In an early moment when Pierre needs to step aside from a certain teaching position, Paul Langevin fills in. And even Einstein, Albert Einstein, has this incredible quote, which is like, ‘oh yeah, if I hadn’t discovered the theory of relativity, Langevin probably would have done it.’ But no one remembers Paul Langevin.

Holly: Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.

Lauren: Exactly. So they start this sort of torrid romance, but there’s a catch, which is that Langevin is married. When his wife catches wind of this affair, she’s not pleased, even though I think he had a long history of infidelity. But she ends up having someone go to the apartment where they’re meeting and taking their letters, and she ends up publishing them just on the eve of Marie Curie winning the second Nobel Prize. So this is an international scandal. One of the French newspapers says ‘there hasn’t been such a scandal since the theft of the Mona Lisa.’

Holly: And these letters, they’re very explicit and passionate and I wrote another quote down of one that she’d written saying, “I’d spent last evening and night thinking of you and the hours we had together. I hold the delicious memory” like there is this seeming intensity about this new relationship that she’s having with Paul.

Lauren: It fits with the pattern, right? Here is someone that she can really have a scientific partnership with as well and not to jump ahead, but I think the scandal basically just undermines their romance too drastically. It’s so terrible and the vitriol aimed at her is so aggressive that she has to leave the country, travel under a pseudonym.

Holly: Do you want to give a little bit more detail about the kind of reaction that she gets from the public over this relationship?

Lauren: Yeah. She’s vilified as a foreigner, as a Jew. There’s a lot of antisemitism. This is just following the Dreyfus affair. She’s not Jewish, but she’s Polish, and so they call her a Jew. There’s all kinds of xenophobia aimed at her and misogyny. There were even five duels were fought about this. Paul Langevin has this great quote, he says, ‘it’s idiotic, but I must do it.’ I think duelling by that point was actually illegal, but still the kind of fumes of it. It takes basically World War One to change the subject.

Holly: Yeah and so with that, maybe we should go on to her professional accomplishments. To scoot back to just after Pierre had died, didn’t she take over his teaching job at the Sorbonne?

Lauren: Right. So that’s the kind of consolation prize that she gets from the university when he’s killed. Needless to say, it’s very bittersweet for her and hard to really celebrate in that moment that she’s just become the first woman professor at the Sorbonne in a 650 year history of this institution, only because her husband has been killed and she can step into his shoes.

Holly: Absolutely, bittersweet is the best way of describing it, I think. Because she makes history again when it comes to the Nobel Prize?

Lauren: Right. So when they won in 1903, she was the first woman. And now she’s not only the first woman to win two in 1911, but the first person to have won two Nobel Prizes – two different subjects, physics and then chemistry. Because of the Langevin scandal, the Nobel committee writes to her and says, ‘actually, can you just say that you can’t make it because this is too messy for us?’ And so she writes them back and she says, ‘no, there’s no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.’ And she’s like, ‘I’ll see you in Sweden’ and she stands up to them, which I think is so fantastic. And she has the support of Albert Einstein and other eminent figures from the period, but you can imagine the guts it took.

Holly: Absolutely and not just the guts to say you’re going, but to actually go and stand in front of a room of her peers and give her speech that she didn’t get to do the first time.

Lauren: And it’s really funny. There’s letters being written among the Nobel committee, and they’re like, ‘oh who will we sit with? She can’t sit with the Swedish King at the table. It’s too scandalous. We don’t want to kind of insult their delicate sensibilities’ and all these kind of petty logistics that they’re worried about. And as it turns out, just like a matter of, I don’t know, months or a year or so later that King, King Gustaf V of Sweden, is exposed also of having an affair with a married man. So I kind of love that detail.

Holly: Yeah, they needn’t have worried so much. And then you mentioned World War One. What was her experience during the war?

Lauren: Right away, she wanted to put her skills to use in the war effort, and she had a brilliant idea, which was to create mobile X-ray units. This was a completely novel innovation and so she figured out how to rig up automobile, like a small truck, with X-ray equipment and power it through the car’s engine and she was able to bring these vehicles onto the battlefield where they could X-ray the soldiers before they were treated. So you could actually see where the bullets were instead of a doctor just kind of blindly poking around, these exploratory surgeries, which inevitably could cause more trauma than healing. You could actually have the technology to see where the injury was, to see what needed to be done for treatment. And so by the end of the war, they had treated, I think, approximately 10,000 soldiers. She was with her daughter Irène, who was 16 years old, going out onto these World War One battlefields.

Holly: But again, that must have taken a lot of persistence on her part and working out how to get over those barriers of not just working out the logistics and actually how to do it, but funding and making sure that she found ways to do that. 

Lauren: You can only imagine right? In wartime, working with a government to set up some kind of totally new operation like that. 

Holly: Is that the time when she said she would sell or like, they could melt down her Nobel Prizes or something like that? And they thought, probably we’ll just give you…

Lauren: Yeah, exactly. She converted her savings to war bonds, and she offered to melt down her Nobel to fund the war effort. They said, ‘thanks, but that’s okay.’

Holly: But she’d shown them that she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

Lauren: Exactly. I was also going to mention that she was entrusted to smuggle a suitcase of radium into the countryside to get it out of Paris, out of the hands of the enemy.

Holly: Oh see I’d read that story about how she’d taken this suitcase, but I’d never quite understood why she was taking the suitcase out of Paris. But it’s to try and make sure that it was safe. She travelled on the train with it and everything didn’t she?

Lauren: Yeah.

Holly: Which nowadays would be not done. Let’s talk about this slightly because it is important to the end of her life. What were the physical effects that she experienced after so many years of consistent exposure to radiation and continuing during the First World War when they were doing these X-rays?

Lauren: So during the war with that mission, she and her daughter were exposed to untold amounts of radiation. You can just imagine, in those small trucks doing the X-rays on the soldiers. She lives a remarkably long time, given her exposure. She lived till 1934. She’s died of aplastic anaemia, which is said to be linked to her radiation exposure. So she was definitely deteriorating due to the radiation exposure. But her daughter, Irène, who was exposed from a much earlier age right? Marie started this work in her mid 20s, which is young, certainly, but not as young. Irène was 16. So she doesn’t even live as long as Marie ended up living.

Holly: No. Their daughters fall into the next question that I was going to ask about what you see as their legacy of Marie and Pierre Curie as a couple?

Lauren: Well, so many things and just to give one other detail about the effects of radiation and how it’s part of their legacy. Pierre Curie had this idea. They were always trying things and, I think, this is a big part of their legacy to me is how imaginative they were. How they’re always willing to take a leap of faith and I think that’s a quality in scientific research that’s maybe not recognised as much as it should be. But I think they were deeply imaginative and Pierre at one point straps a small tube of radium to his arm just to see what would happen and he ends up, as his daughter Ève puts it later, to his joy a lesion appeared, and he has this terrible cut on his arm. But it gives them the epiphany that if radium can destroy healthy tissue, perhaps it can also destroy diseased tissue and this is part of their work together. They use radiation and radium to treat cancer patients during their lifetime. And I think one of the reasons that in the book I wanted to not separate their private work from their scientific research is because I think these didn’t adhere to conventional divisions. They didn’t separate hard science, laboratory science from medical science, from the ethical implications of the work. They saw that these things are intertwined and I think that’s a really important part of their legacy, that when they built the Curie Institute, they built it next to a hospital, and they worked with the doctors there. That was really innovative at the time. That was not done. And they thought about the potential for weaponry that their discoveries also implied. Some scientists will forswear that connection, say ‘that’s not my problem.’ There’s a sort of purity to this work. It’s about the discovery, but they saw themselves as citizens and they wanted to account for that. Pierre talked about that in his Nobel speech, and then Marie in her work during the war and in her work later on for the League of Nations, they advocated for peace. They advocated for humanitarian causes.

Holly: And for the sharing of science as well, because they never…is patented the right word when you talk about a scientific discovery, is that correct?

Lauren: Yeah, right, exactly. They had no interest in profiting personally from their work. They saw this knowledge as something that belonged to humanity, and they could have patented that work, as you say. They could have tried to just get rich off radium, which radium was considered a wonder drug when they first discovered it. There were so many commercial applications.

Holly: Something I enjoyed about your book was how you punctuate it with different ways in which their work affected society and the world we live in. And some of the examples of things that radium were in were disturbing many many ways. Going back to their daughters, they both ended up in one way or another, accepting Nobel Prizes.

Lauren: Yeah. So Irène Curie, she is the older daughter and she is an assistant to Marie, and then Paul Langevin introduces her to a guy named Frédéric Joliot and they ended up married and they ended up winning a Nobel Prize for their discovery of what’s called artificial radiation. And then Ève Curie married a man who was involved with UNICEF. Ève Curie lived in New York City, and I think she died not that long ago. She died while I was working on the book or just after at 103 [102] years old, which just shows for the other women in the family to have died so young. It makes it more plausible to draw that connection between their radiation exposure and their life expectancy. But it’s interesting, I interviewed the granddaughter of Marie and Pierre, Hélène, who is the daughter of Irène and she is a renowned physicist in her own right. But I think because everyone else in her family won the Nobel Prize, she’s exceedingly modest. I was like, ‘oh, you’re a scientist as well’ and she said, ‘some people make great steps. Other people just make small steps.’ 

Holly: But as you said, science is just building on top of lots of discoveries as they go. So I think maybe we can not be modest for her.

Lauren: Exactly. And there’s one more fact, in the context of this podcast seems significant, is that she married the grandson of Paul Langevin.

Holly: Yes, of course which I just find the perfect little tying of the bow at the end of their story. I wanted to ask as my last question: how you think that Marie and Pierre should be remembered?

Lauren: I think the various threads that we’ve touched on seem significant. The connection between imagination, intellectual curiosity and scientific discovery and the ethical consciousness which was a context within which they worked doing their scientific research. They never separated decency from discovery.

Holly: Thank you so much for talking to me about them. I have thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it.

Lauren: Me too. Thank you so much. Such a pleasure to talk with you.

Holly: And thank you for listening. I hope that you enjoyed listening to the story behind the partnership between Marie and Pierre Curie. They were really incredible individuals, but their combined life is just fascinating. I actually made a note of a quote from one of Pierre’s love letters which, I think, epitomises this. He wrote: “It would, nevertheless, be a beautiful thing in which I hardly dare believe, to pass through life together hypnotised in our dreams: your dream for your country; our dream for humanity; our dream for science.” And so I think what these two embody in terms of their devotion, persistence and passion is very special, as is the book that Lauren wrote about them. I can’t stress enough how different and thoughtful her book Radioactive is. It is a simply beautiful visual non-fiction book which tells the story of Marie and Pierre in an imaginative, memorable format. Lauren’s work approaches their love story with respect and admiration as she explores how two people changed the scientific landscape forever. And though Marie Curie once said: “There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life” certainly her private life, the Curies’ love story, is very much intertwined with their discoveries.

If you want to read more by Lauren, I will leave a link to her website in the show notes or if you want to follow her over on Instagram it’s just @laurenredniss.

And well that brings season 3 to an end. Thank you so much for listening. Remember to pop back into the podcast archive if you have missed any episodes so far. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe wherever you are listening to it now. I absolutely love hearing what you think and sharing, liking, rating the podcast will help other true romantics with a love of history to find us.

And then, if Past Loves has become your current love, you can also follow me over on Instagram @pastlovespodcast where the conversation does continue – until soon!