Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [7]
Marie, however, was not a big party girl. She had not come for a good time. She moved in with her sister and brother-in-law in the “Little Poland” area of Paris. It was an hour’s commute by horse-drawn bus to her real new home: the Sorbonne. She promptly enrolled in physical sciences, one of 23 women among 1,800 students. On registering for classes, she signed her name as Marie, the name she used ever after. With a bit of struggle, she became perfectly fluent in French (though she never lost her unmistakable Polish accent).
After a few months with her sister and brother-in-law, Marie struck out on her own, determined to take care of herself as cheaply as possible, without any help. She moved to the Latin Quarter, a funky area for students and artists, which was closer to school. She lived alone in a series of unheated attics—what were formerly servants’ rooms, often six flights up. In the winter, when the water in her washbasin would freeze solid, she slept with all her clothes piled on top of her. At night, after classes, experiments in the lab, and reading in the library, she ate a piece of chocolate with some bread, or once in a while an egg. One time she fainted on the street. Bronia brought her home and made her stubborn sister eat steak and potatoes.
Yet Marie always recalled this period with fondness, as “one of the best memories of my life.” She was happy: “It was like a new world open to me, the world of science which I was at last permitted to know in all liberty.”
Even in France, “No Girls Allowed” signs were still around. All the laws favored men—French women couldn’t vote, and young girls were educated separately in inferior schools. A popular book of the day discussed the “feeble-mindedness” of women. Female college students were so rare that the word in French (étudiante) was also slang for mistress of a male student. “Their study makes them ugly,” wrote one wit—they were considered a joke, attempting to change the laws of nature, probably not respectable.
All that mattered to ultra-serious Marie was that the Sorbonne allowed her to keep coming to classes. Her childhood in Poland had taught her how to fly under the radar. She didn’t dwell on how unusual she was, never talked about it, and always reported that other students treated her respectfully. Clearly not husband-hunting, she didn’t indulge in parties or café life. Now her only social interest was “serious conversations concerning scientific problems.”
In these post-Pasteur years, the French government was more generous with its financial support of the sciences. The Sorbonne had new lecture halls as big as theaters, and shiny, modern labs with state-of-the-art equipment. Marie’s teachers were the best men in science in France at the time.
Her physics professor, for example, was Gabriel Lippmann, who invented color photography a few years later (winning the 1908 Nobel Prize for it). Emile duclaux, a cutting-edge researcher and early advocate of Pasteur’s theories, was her biological chemistry professor. For math, Marie had Henri Poincaré, the greatest mathematician of his day. Her professors were impressed by Marie, and several helped her later on at various points in her career.
One textbook she had already mastered was the latest edition of Mendeleyev’s Principles of Chemistry. His periodic table was a system of ordering the elements according to what a single atom of the element was believed to weigh (its atomic mass). He went from the lightest (hydrogen, which became number 1) to the heaviest.
Among the sixty different elements known at the time, many had common characteristics in their chemical properties. Mendeleyev saw these subtle, shared similarities. And when he arranged the elements in horizontal rows of a certain length, he ended up with a chart where the vertical