Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [5]
Returning to Warsaw, she started work as a teacher. At the same time, she continued her studies by taking part in something secret and highly illegal. A group of Polish women were organizing a free academy. Because the women met in different homes, moving from place to place to avoid detection by Russian police, the school was known as the “Flying University.” Among the eventual thousand or so women in the Flying University, she met others like her, ambitious and eager for education. She began a program of self-education, reading widely—science, politics, literature—as well as illustrating fables, writing poetry, working for an underground science magazine.
In the air was a new fervor for science and industry, previously thought too practical for the literature- and philosophy-loving szlachta. Like other young people, Marie admired Auguste Comte, a French philosopher who coined the term “positivism.” Positivists believed that scientific and technological advances were the way to improve a society. Intuition and speculation were out. The scientific method was in, using evidence that could be observed, checked, and tested in order to affirm theories. Polish positivism had a special twist—education and hard work would provide the way to rescue Poland. Education, not military might, was the best weapon.
Marie glossed right over Comte’s assertion that women were “naturally inferior.” Instead, she treasured a contemporary novelist, Eliza Orzeszkowa, who wrote that “a woman possesses the same rights as a man . . . to learning and knowledge.”
At seventeen, she still hadn’t narrowed her vision to a particular field. Her interests were broad—literature, sociology, and science. Yet already she was entertaining the thought of a career in biology or medicine . . . or perhaps deciphering the mysteries of the elements by using instruments like the ones locked up in her father’s glass cabinet.
But how could she go about doing that? Who would help her?
CHAPTER TWO
The Pact
MARIE ARRIVED AT a solution. A far from perfect one, but the best she could devise under the circumstances. She made a deal with her sister, who craved education as much as she did.
At nineteen, Bronia wanted to be a doctor like their older brother. This was an impossible goal for a girl in Poland. So Marie offered to work and turn her wages over to Bronia, so she could go off and study medicine in the intellectual paradise of Paris. In turn, once Bronia was a doctor, she would bring Marie to Paris and help her go to college. The sisters placed total trust in each other. Marie put her own hopes on hold.
Being a governess was respectable work. So immediately, she looked around for the highest-paying governess job she could find. She signed on for a three-year position at an estate sixty miles outside of Warsaw: “Scarcely seventeen, I left my father’s house to begin an independent life. That going away remains one of the most vivid memories of my youth. My heart was heavy as I climbed into the railway car. It was to carry me for several hours, away from those I loved.”
The family who employed her was congenial enough. The father owned a beet-sugar farm and factory. Marie was part servant, part member of the family. She was to teach the family’s two girls, one of whom was her own age. Casimir, the oldest son, was away studying math at Warsaw University.
The most meaningful hours in her day were the ones early in the morning before her official duties began and late at night when she had free time. She prepared herself for college, keeping three books going at once on subjects that intrigued her. It was good training, because she became used to working independently. Her father mailed her advanced problems to solve in algebra or trigonometry. She would turn to them, she said, “When I feel myself quite unable to read with profit.” And her vision of the future became clearer—what she was most passionate