[Illustration: PIERRE CURIE IN 1906.
Hellog Dujardin Dujardin
Imp. Ch. Wütmann]
PIERRE CURIE
BY
MARIE CURIE
_Translated by
CHARLOTTE AND VERNON KELLOGG_
WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY MRS. WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY
AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
BY MARIE CURIE
_ILLUSTRATED_
NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1923
Copyright, 1923,
By MARIE CURIE.
"It is possible to conceive that in criminal hands radium might prove
very dangerous, and the question therefore arises whether it be to the
advantage of humanity to know the secrets of nature, whether we he
sufficiently mature to profit by them, or whether that knowledge may not
prove harmful. Take, for instance, the discoveries of Nobel--powerful
explosives have made it possible for men to achieve admirable things,
but they are also a terrible means of destruction in the hands of those
great criminals who draw nations into war. I am among those who believe
with Nobel that humanity will obtain more good than evil from future
discoveries."
PIERRE CURIE,
_Nobel Conference, 1903._
TRANSLATORS' NOTE
The translators wish to acknowledge their obligations to Dr. R. B.
Moore, Chief Chemist, U. S. Bureau of Mines, and an American authority
on radium, who kindly read the whole translation in manuscript in order
to assure its accuracy as to the technical details referred to by Madame
Curie in her account of the work of her husband and herself on radium.
PREFACE
It is not without hesitation that I have undertaken to write the
biography of Pierre Curie. I should have preferred confiding this task
to some relative or some friend of his infancy who had followed his
whole life intimately and possessed as full a knowledge of his earliest
years as of those after his marriage. Jacques Curie, Pierre's brother
and the companion of his youth, was bound to him by the tenderest
affection. But after his appointment to the University of Montpellier, he
lived far from Pierre, and he therefore insisted that I should write the
biography, believing that no one else better knew and understood the
life of his brother. He communicated to me all his personal memories;
and to this important contribution, which I have utilized in full, I
have added details related by my husband himself and a few of his
friends. Thus I have reconstituted as best I could that part of his
existence that I did not know directly. I have, in addition, tried
faithfully to express the profound impression his personality made upon
me during the years of our life together.
This narrative is, to be sure, neither complete nor perfect. I hope,
nevertheless, that the picture it gives of Pierre Curie is not deformed,
and that it will help to conserve his memory. I wish, too, that it might
remind those who knew him of the reasons for which they loved him.
M. C.
CONTENTS
Introduction
CHAPTER
I. The Curie Family. Infancy and First
Studies of Pierre Curie
II. Dreams of Youth. First Scientific Work.
Discovery of Piezo-Electricity
III. Life as the Director of Laboratory Work
in the School of Physics and Chemistry.
Generalization of the Principle of Symmetry.
Investigations of Magnetism
IV. Marriage and Organization of Family Life.
Personality and Character
V. The Dream Become a Reality. The Discovery
of Radium
VI. The Struggle for Means to Work. The Burden
of Celebrity. The First Assistance
from the State. It Comes Too Late
VII. The Nation's Sorrow. The Laboratories:
"Sacred Places"
Autobiographical Notes--Marie Curie
ILLUSTRATIONS
Pierre Curie in 1906.
Pierre and Marie Curie in their laboratory, where
radium was discovered.
A view of the extraction of radium in the old shed
where the first radium was obtained.
Pierre Curie with the quartz piezo-electroscope he invented,
by which rays of radium are measured.
A view of the extraction of radium in the old shed
where the first radium was obtained.
Mme. Curie instructing American soldiers in her
Paris laboratory.
Madame Curie in her laboratory at the Institut Curie,
Paris.
Mme. Curie and President Harding at the White
House, May 20, 1921, when a gram of radium was
presented to its discoverer by the women of
America.
PIERRE CURIE
THE LIFE STORY OF
PIERRE CURIE
INTRODUCTION
BY MRS. WILLIAM BROWN MELONEY
Every little while a man or a woman is born to serve in some big way.
Such a one surely is Marie Curie. Her discovery of radium has advanced
science, relieved human suffering and enriched the world. The spirit in
which she has done her work has challenged the minds and souls of men.
One morning in the spring of 1898, when the United States was going to
war with Spain, Madame Curie stepped forth from a crude shack on the
outskirts of Paris, with the greatest secret of the century literally in
the palm of her hand.
It was one of the silent, unheralded great moments in the world's
history.
The discovery which had become a fact that morning was no accident. It
was a triumph over hardship and doubting men. It represented years of
patient labor. Madame Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie, had wrested
from Mother Earth one of her most priceless secrets.
I have been asked to tell why I undertook the Marie Curie Radium
Campaign and how I persuaded Madame Curie to write this book.
It is with much hesitancy that I venture to write a preface to this
book. She once chided me, in her gentle way, for an article in which I
had stated facts with some feeling--although the facts praised her. "In
science," she said, "we should be interested in things, not persons."
Madame Curie is the most modest of women. It is only after long
persuasion that she has consented to record the autobiographical notes
contained in this book. Still, so much has been left unsaid,
uninterpreted, that I feel an obligation to say a word toward a fuller
understanding of this great and noble character.
In 1915 I wrote in my editor's suggestion book: "Greatest woman's story
in the world--Marie Curie, discoverer of radium."
For the next four years scarcely any writer of prominence went abroad
without a commission from me to bring back the story of Madame Curie.
Always they returned with the report: "She was not to be found," or "She
was at the front somewhere," or "She won't see journalists." My own
letters to Madame Curie brought no reply. I did not know then that great
bags of mail from all parts of the world lay piled up in her laboratory
where there was no secretary, while Madame Curie with her X-ray
apparatus was at the front, relieving suffering and saving lives.
In May, 1919, another mission took me to Paris and I resolved to see
Madame Curie myself. My friend, Stéphane Lauzanne, Editor-in-Chief of
_Le Matin_, said: "Give it up. Become interested in something else; she
will see no one. She does nothing but work."
I began to ask questions.
"She is very simple and exceedingly retiring," said Lauzanne. "Few
things in life are more distasteful to her than publicity. Her mind is
as exact and logical as science itself. She cannot accept or understand
exaggerations and inaccurate quotations. She cannot understand why
scientists, rather than science, should be discussed in the press. There
are but two things for her--her little family and her work.
"After the death of Pierre Curie, the faculty and officials of the
University of Paris decided to depart from all precedent and appoint a
woman to a full professorship at the Sorbonne. Madame Curie accepted the
appointment and the date was set for her installation.
"It was the history-making afternoon of October 5th, 1906. The members
of the class which had formerly been instructed by Professor Pierre
Curie were seated in one group.
"There was present a large crowd--celebrities, statesmen, academicians,
all the faculty. Suddenly through a small side door entered a woman all
in black, with pale hands and high arched forehead. The magnificent
forehead won notice first. It was not merely a woman who stood before
us, but a brain--a living thought. Her appearance was enthusiastically
applauded for five minutes. When the applause died down, Madame Curie
bent forward with slightly trembling lips. We wondered what she was
about to say. It was important. It was history, whatever she said.
"In the foreground sat a stenographer, ready to record her words. Would
she speak of her husband? Would she thank the Minister and the public?
No, she began quite simply as follows:
"'When we consider the progress made by the theories of radio-activity
since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century--' The important thing to
this great woman is work. Time should not be wasted in idle words. And
so, dispensing with all superficial formality, with no betrayal of the
tremendous emotion which all but overcame her--except by the extreme
pallor of her face and the trembling of her lips--she continued her
lecture in clear, well-modulated tones.
"It was typical of this great soul that she should carry on their work
courageously and without faltering.
"You will see," concluded Lauzanne, "it is useless to try to interrupt
her work for interviews."
Later I met one of Madame Curie's fellow scientists who sympathized with
my desire, but who agreed with Lauzanne that an interview was
impossible. Finally, however, he promised to carry a letter to Madame
Curie.
I wrote ten letters and destroyed them. In one I said: "My father, who
was a medical man, wrote: 'It is impossible to exaggerate the
unimportance of people.' But you have been important to me for twenty
years, and I want to see you a few minutes."
The answer came within an hour. I was to go to the laboratory the next
morning.
I had been in Mr. Edison's laboratory a few weeks before sailing from
home. Edison is rich in the material things--as he should be. Every kind
of equipment is at his command. He is a power in the financial as well
as the scientific world. In my childhood I had lived near Alexander
Graham Bell; had admired his great house and his fine horses. A short
time before, I had been in Pittsburgh, where the sky is plumed by the
tall smoke stacks of the greatest radium reduction plants in the world.
I remembered that millions of dollars had been spent on radium watches
and radium gun sights. Several millions of dollars' worth of radium was
even then stored in various parts of the United States. I had been
prepared to meet a woman of the world, enriched by her own efforts and
established in one of the white palaces of the Champs d'Elysées or some
other beautiful boulevard of Paris.
I found a simple woman, working in an inadequate laboratory and living
in a simple apartment on the meager pay of a French professor.
As I entered the new building at Number One Rue Pierre Curie, which
stands out conspicuously among the old walls of the University of Paris,
I had already formed a picture of the laboratory of the discoverer of
radium.
I waited a few minutes in the bare little office which might have been
furnished from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Then the door opened and I saw a
pale, timid little woman in a black cotton dress, with the saddest face
I had ever looked upon.
Her well-formed hands were rough. I noticed a characteristic, nervous
little habit of rubbing the tips of her fingers over the pad of her
thumb in quick succession. I learned later that working with radium had
made them numb. Her kind, patient, beautiful face had the detached
expression of a scholar. Suddenly I felt like an intruder.
I was struck dumb. My timidity exceeded her own. I had been a trained
interrogator for twenty years, but I could not ask a single question of
this gentle woman in a black cotton dress. I tried to explain that
American women were interested in her great work, and found myself
apologizing for intruding upon her precious time. To put me at my ease,
Madame Curie began to talk about America. She had for many years wanted
to visit my country, but she could not be separated from her children.
"America," she said, "has about fifty grammes of radium. Four of these
are in Baltimore, six in Denver, seven in New York." She went on naming
the location of every grain.
"And in France?" I asked.
"My laboratory," she replied simply, "has hardly more than a gramme."
"_You_ have only a gramme?" I exclaimed. That meant less than
one-twenty-ninth of an ounce.
"I? Oh, I have none," she corrected. "It belongs to my laboratory."
I suggested royalties on her patents. Surely she had protected her right
to the processes by which radium is produced. The revenue from such
patents should have made her a very rich woman.
Quietly, and without any seeming consciousness of the tremendous
renunciation, she said, "There were no patents. We were working in the
interests of science. Radium was not to enrich any one. Radium is an
element. It belongs to all people."
She had contributed to the progress of science and the relief of human
suffering, and yet, in the prime of her life she was without the tools
which would enable her to make further contribution of her genius.
"If you had the whole world to choose from," I asked impulsively, "what
would you take?" It was a silly question, perhaps, but as it happened,
a fateful one.
"You ought to have everything in the world you need to go on with your
work," I said. "Some one must undertake this."
"Who will?" she asked rather hopelessly.
"The women of America," I promised--and then I rose to go.
That week I learned that the market price of a gramme of radium was one
hundred thousand dollars. I also learned that Madame Curie's laboratory,
although practically a new building, was without sufficient equipment;
that the radium held there was used at that time only for extracting
emanations for hospital use in cancer treatment.
I saw Madame Curie at the Institute again and then in her own home--a
small apartment in the Ile St. Louis, where she lived with her two
daughters. It was a happy, busy little family. They had no protest
against life except to regret that lack of equipment interfered with the
important research work Madame Curie and her daughter, Irene, should
have been doing.
It was my hope when I arrived in New York, a few weeks afterwards, to
find ten women to subscribe ten thousand dollars each for the purchase
of a gramme of radium, and in this way to enable Madame Curie to go on
with her work, without the publicity of a general campaign. That hope
was soon dashed. I found one or two such women, but not ten.
There were not ten to buy that gramme of radium but there were a hundred
thousand women and a group of men to help, who determined the money must
be raised.
My first direct and substantial support came from Mrs. William Vaughn
Moody, widow of the American poet and playwright.
When we found it would be necessary to launch a national campaign, Mrs.
Robert G. Mead, a doctor's daughter, and one who had been a standby in
cancer prevention work, became secretary, and Mrs. Nicholas F. Brady an
executive member of the committee. Behind these women stood a group of
scientific men, who knew what radium had meant to humanity, among them
Dr. Robert Abbe, the first American surgeon to use radium, and Dr.
Francis Carter Wood.
In less than a year the fund had been raised.
Stéphane Lauzanne describes a second impressive moment in the life of
Madame Curie. It was nearly a year after my talk with her. It was
fifteen years since that scene at the University of Paris. These years
had been spent in her laboratory; she had made no public appearance. It
was in March, 1921, that Monsieur Lauzanne heard her voice again.
"I lifted the telephone receiver," he relates, "and heard these words:
'Madame Curie wishes to speak to you.' What extraordinary event--what
tragedy, perhaps, might this not mean? And suddenly, over the wire came
the sound of the voice which I had heard only once before, but which had
stayed in my memory--the same voice which had once pronounced the words,
'When we consider the progress made by the theories of radio-activity
since the beginning of the Nineteenth Century----'
"'I wanted to tell you that I am going to America,' she said. 'It was
very hard for me to decide to go, because America is so far and so big.
If some one did not come for me, I should probably never have made the
trip. I should have been too frightened. But to this fear is added a
great joy. I have devoted my life to the science of radio-activity and I
know all we owe to America in the field of science. I am told you are
among those who strongly favor this distant trip, so I wanted to tell
you I have decided to go, but please don't let any one know about it.'
"This great woman--the greatest woman in France--was speaking haltingly,
tremblingly, almost like a little girl. She, who handles daily a
particle of radium more dangerous than lightning, was afraid when
confronted by the necessity of appearing before the public."
A little later, when Madame Curie and I had embarked for America, where
she was to receive her radium and other experimental material, I asked
her if, the day I had first given her the promise, she had believed that
American women would rally to her aid.
"No," she confessed honestly, "but I knew you were sincere."
About the time of her marriage, one of her relatives gave Madame Curie a
gift of money to be used for a trousseau. It was not a great sum, but
important to the poor student in Paris. To understand the significance
of the use to which she put this fund, it is necessary to remember that
Marie Sklodowska was young, and possessed physical beauty and charm. She
was not without appreciation of the beautiful, and she could not
possibly have been utterly unconscious of her own appearance. She had a
young girl's natural interest in pretty clothes. She considered the
purchase of a wedding gown and other personal belongings, and then, with
her characteristic exactness, measured her needs and the future.
She was married in a simple dress she had brought from Poland, and her
trousseau fund was spent on two bicycles, so that she and Pierre Curie
might enjoy the beautiful country of France. That was their honeymoon.
One dream that Madame Curie held, and still holds unrealized, is the
hope of a quiet little home of her own with a garden and hedge, and
flowers and birds. During her American travels, she would frequently
glance through the window as the train passed through a small town, and,
spying some modest little house with a garden, would say, "I have always
wanted such a little home."
But owning a house was secondary in the life of both Pierre and Marie
Curie. They simply made a home wherever they lived, for such money as
might have gone for the purchase of her little dream house was always
needed in the laboratory. She told me one day, with deep feeling, that
one of the regrets of her life was that Pierre Curie had died without
ever having had a permanent laboratory.
She had, as I have said, refused opportunities to come to the United
States because she could not endure separation from her children. She
was, I think, finally persuaded to face the long trip and the terrifying
publicity attending it, partly because of her gratitude for the support
given her scientific work, but principally because it offered a splendid
opportunity for travel to her daughters.
There is in Madame Curie none of the legendary coldness and
thoughtlessness attributed to the scientist. During the war, when she
ran her own radiological truck and lived on the march from hospital to
hospital in the zone of operations, she washed and dried and pressed her
own clothes. Once during our American travels, we stayed in a home where
there were several other house guests besides our party of five. I
entered Madame Curie's room and found her washing her underclothes.
"It is nothing at all," she said, when I protested. "I know perfectly
well how to do it, and with all of these extra guests in the house, the
servants have enough to do."
On the night before the reception at the White House, at which President
Harding was to present the gramme of radium to Madame Curie, the Deed
was brought to Madame Curie. It was a beautifully engraved scroll,
prepared in the office of Coudert Brothers, vesting all rights to a
gramme of radium, the gift of American women, in Madame Curie.
She read the paper carefully, and then, after a few moments of thought,
said: "It is very fine and generous, but it must not be left this way.
This gramme of radium represents a great deal of money, but more than
that, it represents the women of this country. It is not for me; it is
for science. I am not well; I may die any day. My daughter Eve is not of
legal age, and if I should die it would mean that this radium would go
to my estate and would be divided between my daughters. It is not for
that purpose. This radium must be consecrated for all time to the use of
science. Will you have your lawyer draw a paper which will make this
very clear?"
I said that it would be done in a few days.
"It must be done to-night," she said. "To-morrow I receive the radium,
and I might die tomorrow. Too much is at stake."
And so, late as it was on that hot May evening, after some difficulty,
we secured the services of a lawyer, who prepared the paper from a draft
Madame Curie herself had written. She signed it before starting for
Washington.
This document read:
"In the event of my death I give to the Institut du Radium, of Paris,
for exclusive use in the Laboratoire Curie, the gramme of radium which
was given to me by the Executive Committee of Women of the Marie Curie
Radium Fund, pursuant to an agreement dated the 19th day of May, 1921."
This act was consistent with the whole life of the discoverer of radium;
with the answer she had made to my question a year before:
"Radium is not to enrich any one. It is an element; it is for all
people."
During her American travels, I repeatedly requested Madame Curie to
write the story of her life. I urged its importance to history and its
influence among students preparing to consecrate their lives to science.
Finally she consented. "But it will not be much of a book," she said.
"It is such an uneventful, simple little story. I was born in Warsaw of
a family of teachers. I married Pierre Curie and had two children. I
have done my work in France."
A simple statement, but fraught with what meaning! When most of us shall
have been forgotten, when even the Great World War shall have dwindled
to a few pages in the history books, when Governments shall have fallen
and risen and fallen again, the work of Marie Curie will be remembered.
Of her work and her husband's, volumes--veritable libraries--have been
written since that spring morning in 1898, when after an all night vigil
in a shack on the outskirts of Paris, she came forth with the great gift
of radium to mankind. Scientists will go on adding to the bibliography
of the marvelous element. But of Marie Curie herself, the woman, it is
unlikely that the world will ever read more than the brief notes which
compose this small book.
It is her conviction, her philosophy, that "In science we should be
interested in things, not persons."
CHAPTER I
THE CURIE FAMILY. INFANCY AND FIRST
STUDIES OF PIERRE CURIE
Pierre Curie's parents, who were educated and intelligent, formed a part
of the _petite bourgeoisie_ of small means. They did not frequent
fashionable society, but confined themselves entirely to the
companionship of their relatives and a few intimate friends.
Eugène Curie, Pierre's father, was a physician and the son of a
physician. He knew very few kinsmen of his name, and very little about
the Curie family, which was of Alsatian (Eugène Curie was born at
Mulhouse in 1827) and Protestant origin. Even though his father was
established in London, Eugène had been brought up in Paris, where he
pursued his studies in the natural sciences and medicine, and worked as
preparator under Gratiollet in the laboratories of the Museum.
Doctor Eugène Curie's remarkable personality impressed all who
approached him. He was a tall man, who in youth must have been blonde,
with beautiful blue eyes of a clearness and brilliancy that were
striking even in an advanced old age. These eyes, which had retained a
child-like expression, reflected goodness and intelligence. He had
indeed unusual intellectual capacities, a very live aptitude for the
natural sciences, and the temperament of a scholar.
Although he wished to consecrate his life to scientific work, family
responsibilities following his marriage and the birth of two sons forced
him to renounce this desire. The necessities of life obliged him to
practice his medical profession. He continued, however, such
experimental research as his means permitted, in particular undertaking
an investigation upon inoculation for tuberculosis at a time when the
bacterial nature of this malady was not yet established. His scientific
avocations developed in him the habit of making excursions in search of
the plants and animals necessary to his experiments, and this habit, as
well as his love of Nature, gave him a marked preference for country
life. Until the end of his life he conserved his love for science, and,
without doubt, also, his regret at not having been able to devote
himself exclusively to it.
His medical career remained always a modest one, but it revealed
remarkable qualities of devotion and disinterestedness. At the time of
the Revolution of 1848, when he was still a student, the Government of
the Republic conferred on him a medal, "for his honorable and courageous
conduct" in serving the wounded. He himself had been struck, on February
24th, by a ball which shattered a part of his jaw. A little later,
during a cholera epidemic, he installed himself, in order that he might
look after the sick, in a quarter of Paris deserted by physicians.
During the Commune he established a hospital in his apartment (rue de la
Visitation) near which there was a barricade, and there he cared for the
wounded. Through this act of civism and because of his advanced
convictions he lost a part of his _bourgeois_ patronage. At this time he
accepted the position of medical inspector of the organization for the
protection of young children. The duties of this post permitted him to
live in the suburbs of Paris where health conditions for himself and his
family were much better than those of the city.
Doctor Curie had very pronounced political convictions. Temperamentally
an idealist, he had embraced with ardor that republican doctrine which
inspired the revolutionaries of 1848. He was united in friendship with
Henri Brisson and the men of his group. Like them, a free thinker and an
anticlerical, he did not have his sons baptized, nor did he have them
practice any form of religion.
Pierre's mother, Claire Depouilly, was the daughter of a prominent
manufacturer of Puteaux, near Paris. Her father and brothers
distinguished themselves through their numerous inventions connected
with the making of dyes and special tissues. The family, which was of
Savoy, was caught in the business catastrophe caused by the Revolution
of 1848, and ruined. And these reverses of fortune, added to those which
Doctor Curie had experienced during his career, meant that he and his
family lived always in comparatively straightened circumstances, with
the difficulties of existence often renewed. Even though raised for a
life of ease, Pierre's mother accepted with tranquil courage the
precarious conditions which life brought her, and gave proof of an
extreme devotion as she made life easier for her husband and children by
her activity and her good will.
If the circumstances in which Jacques and Pierre grew up were modest and
not free from cares, nevertheless there reigned in the family an
atmosphere of gentleness and affection. In speaking to me for the first
time of his parents, Pierre Curie said that they were "exquisite."
They were, in truth, that. The father's spirit was a little
authoritative--always awake and active. And he possessed a rare
unselfishness. He neither wished nor knew how to profit by personal
relations to ameliorate his condition. He loved his wife and sons
tenderly, and was ever ready to aid all who needed him. The mother was
slight, vivid in character, and, even though her health had suffered
through the birth of her sons, was always gay and active in the simple
home that she so well knew how to make attractive and hospitable.
When I first knew them they lived at Sceaux, rue des Sablons (to-day rue
Pierre Curie) in a little house of ancient construction half concealed
amidst the verdure of a pretty garden. Their life was peaceful. Doctor
Curie went where his duties called him, either in Sceaux or in
neighboring localities. Beyond this he occupied himself with his garden
or his reading. Near relatives and neighbors came to visit on Sundays,
when bowling and chess were the favorite amusements. From time to time
Henri Brisson sought out his old companion in his tranquil retreat.
Great calm and serenity enveloped the garden, the dwelling, and its
inhabitants.
Pierre Curie was born the 15th of May, 1859, in a house facing the
Jardin des Plantes, rue Cuvier, where his parents lived at the time when
his father was working in the Museum laboratories. He was the second son
of Doctor Curie and three and a half years younger than his brother
Jacques. In after life he retained few particularly characteristic
memories of his childhood in Paris; yet he did tell me how vividly
present in his mind were the days of the Commune, the battle on the
barricade so near the house where he then lived, the hospital
established by his father, and the expeditions, on which his brother
accompanied him, in search of the wounded.
It was in 1883 that Pierre moved with his parents from the capital to
the suburbs of Paris, living first, from 1883 to 1892, at
Fontenay-aux-Roses, then at Sceaux from 1892 to 1895, the year of our
marriage.
Pierre passed his childhood entirely within the family circle; he never
went to the elementary school nor to the lycée. His earliest
instruction was given him first by his mother and was then continued by
his father and his elder brother, who himself had never followed in any
complete way the course of the lycée. Pierre's intellectual capacities
were not those which would permit the rapid assimilation of a prescribed
course of studies. His dreamer's spirit would not submit itself to the
ordering of the intellectual effort imposed by the school. The
difficulty he experienced in following such a program was usually
attributed to a certain slowness of mind. He himself believed that he
had this slow mind and often said so. I think, however, that this belief
was not entirely justified. It seems to me, rather, that already from
his early youth it was necessary for him to concentrate his thought with
great intensity upon a certain definite object, in order to obtain a
precise result, and that it was impossible for him to interrupt or to
modify the course of his reflections to suit exterior circumstances. It
is clear that a mind of this kind can hold within itself great future
possibilities. But it is no less clear that no system of education has
been especially provided by the public school for persons of this
intellectual category, which nevertheless includes more representatives
than one would believe at first sight.
Very fortunately for Pierre, who could not, as we can see, become a
brilliant pupil in a lycée, his parents had a sufficiently keen
intelligence to understand his difficulty, and they refrained from
demanding of their son an effort which would have been prejudicial to
his development. If, then, Pierre's earliest instruction was irregular
and incomplete, it had the advantage of not so weighing on his
intelligence as to deform it by dogmas, prejudices or preconceived
ideas. And he was always grateful to his parents for this very liberal
attitude. He grew up in all freedom, developing his taste for natural
science through his excursions into the country, where he collected
plants and animals for his father. These excursions, which he made
either alone or with one of the family, helped to awake in him a great
love of Nature, a passion which endured to the end of his life.
Intimate contact with Nature, which, because of the artificial
conditions of city life and of traditional education, few children can
know, had a decisive influence on Pierre's development. Guided by his
father, he learned to observe facts and to interpret them correctly. He
became familiar with the animals and plants of the environs of Paris. He
knew which ones could be found at each season of the year in the forests
and fields, the streams and ponds. The ponds in particular had for him
an ever new attraction with their characteristic vegetation and their
population of frogs, tritons, salamanders, dragonflies, and other
denizens of air and water. No efforts to obtain the objects of his
interests seemed too great for him. He never hesitated to take any
animal in his hands in order to examine it more closely. Later, after
our marriage, in our walks together, if I made some objection to letting
him put a frog into my hands, he would exclaim: "But no, see how pretty
it is!" He loved always, too, to bring back bouquets of wild flowers
from his walks.
Thus his knowledge of natural history progressed rapidly. At the same
time, also, he was mastering the elements of mathematics. His classical
studies, on the contrary, had been much neglected, and it was
principally through general reading that he acquired a knowledge of
literature and history. His father, who was widely cultured, possessed a
library containing many French and foreign works. Having himself a very
pronounced taste for reading, he was able to communicate it to his son.
When he was about fourteen years old, a very happy event occurred in
Pierre's education. He was put under an excellent professor, A. Bazille,
who taught him elementary and advanced mathematics. This master was able
to appreciate his young pupil, became much attached to him, and directed
his work with the greatest solicitude. He even helped him to advance in
his study of Latin, in which he was very much behind. At the same time
Pierre and Albert Bazille, his professor's son, became friends.
This teaching had, I am sure, a great influence on the mind of Pierre,
aiding him to develop and to sound the depth of his faculties and to
realize his capacities for science. He had a remarkable aptitude for
mathematics, which expressed itself chiefly by a characteristic
geometric spirit and a great power of spatial vision. He, therefore,
progressed rapidly and joyfully in his studies under M. Bazille, for
whom he always felt an unalterable gratitude.
He once told me something which proved that even at this time he was not
content solely to follow a fixed program of studies, but that he had
already begun to launch out into personal investigation. Strongly
attracted by the theory of determinants, which he had just mastered, he
undertook to realize an analogous conception, but in three dimensions,
and endeavored to discover the properties and uses of these "cubical
determinants." Needless to say that at his age, and with the knowledge
then at his disposal, such an enterprise was beyond his powers. The
attempt, however, was none the less indicative of his awakening
inventive spirit.
Several years later, when preoccupied with reflections upon symmetry, he
asked himself the question: "Could not one find a general method for the
solution of any equation whatever? Everything is a question of
symmetry." He did not then know of Galois' theory of groups which had
made it possible to attack this problem. But he was happy later to learn
its results in the geometric applications to the case of equations of
the 5th degree.
Thanks to his rapid progress in mathematics and physics, Pierre Curie
was made a bachelor of science at the age of sixteen years. With this he
passed his most difficult stage of formal education. The only thing with
which he had to concern himself in the future was the acquisition of
knowledge through his personal and independent effort in a field of
science freely chosen.