Marie’s altogether different experience of marriage had not only advanced her career instead of ending it, but positioned her to assume her singular role as female head of a laboratory. Wedded to her research partner, she had managed to incorporate love and motherhood into the fullness of a life in science, if only for a while. “A year has passed,” she wrote on the anniversary of Pierre’s death. “I live, for your children, for your aged father. The grief is dull but always there. The burden weighs heavily on my shoulders. How sweet will it be to go to sleep and not wake up? How young my poor
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