The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science

by Dava Sobel

The next week, sitting alone at her workplace in the rue Cuvier, she spilled her thoughts on the graph-paper pages of a lab notebook. “Cher Pierre, whom I’ll never see again,” she began, “I want to talk to you in the silence of this laboratory, where I could not have imagined I would ever find myself without you.” She wrote a dozen pages detailing every moment of their final days together. Even as she strained to render those intimate, idyllic hours indelible in her memory, she could see them blurring and slipping away. “Soon I’ll have only your pictures to rely on. Oh! If only I could paint or sculpt a dear vision to keep you ever present in my eyes.” She tried to make a measurement for a graph on which they had each plotted several points, but felt the impossibility of going on. “In the street I walk as if hypnotized, without noticing anything. I will not kill myself. I have no desire for suicide. But among all these vehicles is there not one to make me share the fate of my beloved?”