雙語(yǔ)·居里夫人的故事 第十五章　無(wú)論發(fā)生什么

Chapter XV　Whatever Happens

MARIE was born to have glorious courage. All her life she had had to call upon her valiancy, and it had grown strong and would not fail her. Moreover, she had truly loved a great man, and Pierre had left her a word to remember and to obey when her world fell to pieces around her. “Whatever might happen,” he had said, one day when they were talking of death, “whatever might happen, and even though one might be like an empty body, whose spirit was dead, it would be one's duty to go on working all the same.” So Marie, fortunately, had to go on working. When a pension was offered her, she refused it, saying she was young enough to earn for herself and her children.

She found an odd little way of comfort which seems to make her all the dearer to us: she wrote her diary as if she were speaking to Pierre:

“They have offered to let me take your place, my Pierre: your lectures and the direction of your laboratory. I have accepted. I don't know if I have done right or wrong. You have often told me that you would like me to give a course of lectures at the Sorbonne. And I would at least like to try to continue your work. At one moment that seems the easiest way to go on living; at another I seem a fool to undertake it.”

“May 7th, 1906:

“My Pierre, I think of you all the time; my head is bursting with the thought of you, and my reason fails. I can't understand that I have to live without you and that I can't smile at my dear life's companion. The trees have been in leaf two days now and the garden is beautiful. This morning I was admiring the children in it. I thought how beautiful you would have thought them and that you would have called me to show me that the periwinkles and narcissus were out…

“May 14th: I want to tell you that they have nominated me to your chair of Physics at the Sorbonne and that there are people imbecile enough to congratulate me on it.” Marie was not too crushed to feel fierce rage at fools.

No woman had ever had the honour of a university chair at the Sorbonne; that is, no woman had been made head of a teaching staff in any subject. But there was no man in France capable of taking over Pierre's work, so it fell naturally to Marie. She alone of living scientists had the genius for it. She determined that her lectures should be worthy of Pierre, so she sent the children to the country and stayed all summer in Paris working on Pierre's subject, on Pierre's notes.

She needed another house and decided to go and live at Sceaux where Pierre was buried. The children's grandfather was a little scared that, when she moved to a smaller house, she would not want him. How could he ask the question? Marie was also a little scared that he would not want to live with a mere daughter-in-law now that his son was dead. The old man tackled the difficult question: “Now that Pierre isn't here, Marie, you have no reason for living with an old man. I can quite well go and live with my eldest son. It is for you to decide.”

“No, you must decide,” Marie whispered. “If you go, you will grieve me. But you must choose what you prefer.”

“What I prefer, Marie, is to stay with you always.”

But the day had to come when Marie would have to go outside her home again where everyone treated her grief with tenderness and respect, and face the outside world where she was now an exciting and famous widow. She knew that the newspapers were asking the Sorbonne to change its rules and make her lecture in the great amphitheatre so that many thousands might hear the first woman to lecture in the Sorbonne. She was probably glad that the Sorbonne was one of the most conservative places on earth and was not likely to change its rules. She had heard that the fashionable crowd, that wished to be present, were discussing what she would say and how she would refer to her husband, because it was the university custom for every new holder of a chair to praise his predecessor. It was the custom to thank the Minister, to thank the university. When the day of its inaugural lecture came, the crowd was waiting, like birds of prey, to hear Marie say something moving, perhaps to see her break down. It was the small amphitheatre, but they thronged it, crushing the real students who were there to learn, even pushing them out of their seats.

Marie entered quickly amid deafening applause. As soon as there was silence, she began her lecture in advanced Physics simply at the place where Pierre had left off: “When we consider the progress which has taken place in physics during the last ten years, we are surprised at the change in our ideas concerning electricity and matter…

The audience was surprised indeed, but at the change in their ideas about something other than electricity. They had gone to see a show; they found themselves meeting a woman, who was no show, but a truly sincere human being who thought more about her work than about herself. They were touched. Tears welled up into their eyes. Marie spoke of the new theories of the structure of electricity, of the disintegration of the atom and of radio-active bodies. At the end of her lecture, which was addressed purely to the students, she left the hall as quickly and as simply as she had entered it.

If her work had been hard before, it became harder. She had to think out how to educate the little girls. She had her work of discovery in the laboratory and her lectures at the Sorbonne. She had her house and garden to see to and, above all, she had a special work of her own to do. She had by some means to get a laboratory built in honour of Pierre, something wonderful and perfect it was to be—the laboratory of his dreams.

Eve and Irène played with their blue-eyed grandfather in the new house at Sceaux. He taught Irène botany and natural history and poetry, and helped her to dig her own garden patch and to plant the right flowers, while Eve made friends with her pet tortoise in the grass or romped with the black or with the tabby cat.

But Marie hastened early in the morning, with that quick, business-like step of hers, to catch the Paris train and did not return till the lights were lit in the evenings. The children did not see much of their mother, but it was she who planned the day the children spent. They had to work for an hour at the beginning of the morning. Irène loved figures and Eve music. After that, they went for a walk in all weathers and then to gym, which they loved. Then they cooked or modelled or sewed or gardened or, on a Saturday and Sunday, or in the holidays, they went out bicycling or swimming with their mother. She meant them to be strong and fearless. They were not allowed to be afraid of the dark or of accidents or of climbing, or of riding, or of animals or of anything. Brave and bold they should be and French. She taught them Polish, but she did not want them to have the unhappiness she had had of feeling themselves part of two nations and one a sad and persecuted country. Only one thing she left out of their educationm—the art of welcoming strangers and being charming at parties. In those things, they had no practice.

Marie did not want her children overworked and hours in French schools are very long, sometimes six hours at school followed by three hours' homework.

Marie and her university friends often talked on the subject and they decided to pool their children and teach them themselves. It was a glorious idea. Those lucky children were to have one lesson a day, but it was to be given by the greatest specialist in Paris. On the first morning they were to go to the Sorbonne laboratory where Jean Perrin taught them chemistry. “The Sorbonne hasn't yet been blown up,” said the newspaper, “but we haven't yet lost all hope.” On the next day they went into the country to be taught mathematics by Paul Langevin; on the next to the sculptor, Magrou, to learn modelling; on another to a professor of modern languages and literature, and on Thursday afternoon to the School of Physics to be taught by Marie Curie. Lucky brats!

In that stately place which had never before heard an easy lesson, they dropped inky bicycle bearings on sloping white boards to see with their own eyes the curves that falling bodies make. Or, Marie asked them such dark questions as: “What must I do to keep the heat in this liquid in this pan?”

“Wrap it in wool,” said one.

“Isolate it,” suggested another.

“I,” smiled Marie, “would begin by putting on the lid.”

Unfortunately however, parents have to be busy earning the family income and have no time to give their own children enchanting lessons. Those delicious lessons ceased, and Eve and Irène went to school where the hours were not quite so long as in most schools. They said in after-life that from those early lessons they learnt to like work, to be indifferent to money and to be so independent that they were convinced that they could pull themselves out of any difficulty.

In the laboratory, among many new triumphs, Marie had one very great triumph. Up to that time she had made only the salts of Radium. On one occasion she and André Debierne succeeded in making Radium metal. They succeeded once. Neither they nor anyone else has ever done it again.

In 1911 Marie was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. No person before her had ever received two Nobel prizes.

One would have thought that all the world would have gloried in her as a scientist and treated her gently as a sad woman. But, unfortunately, there is a strange disease which causes certain people to feel very cruel when they hear of someone being very successful or very beautiful. Marie was both, and suddenly people began to write her anonymous letters and to tell extraordinary lies about her and to accuse her of doing wrong. things of which she had never dreamed. Her friends tried to protect her; but it is difficult to fight against enemies who hide. They felt that the best protection would be for the Academy of Science to give her an open honour by making her a member. It was her due, but no woman had ever been a member. The liars redoubled their efforts to prevent the election. They even went the length of putting a false voting paper into the hand of a blind man, her friend, so that he might seem to oppose her. The Academy of Science, to its lasting disgrace, rejected her by one vote.

Marie was terribly unhappy about the lies. For a time she had to borrow her sister's name to escape from her enemies. She was as open as the day and this attack from the people who skulked in darkness made her ill. It almost destroyed that famous courage of hers, but not quite. She was very ill and in great pain. The surgeons said an operation would save her from pain, but she told them to wait till after she had attended the next Physics Congress. Her courage was still there.

Then when she was still ill there came to her a great decision to make. She was tired and wanted not to have to think, but Poland had decided to build a great laboratory of radio-activity at War-saw, and invited her to be the head of it. How she longed to accept! What an invitation it was! She was told that Poland needed her, that her country was growing discouraged and needed something to make it believe in itself again.

But long years before Marie had decided that greatly though she loved Poland, she loved Pierre Curie more. She still loved him more, and Poland and he were still pulling in opposite directions. If Marie gave herself to Poland, she would have to give up the hope of building Pierre's laboratory. Without her presence in France, Pierre's dream would never come true. She refused Poland sadly.

But Poland insisted that she should direct the new laboratory from a distance and go to the opening of the new building. Many exciting things befell her during that visit. First, she gave an address on Science in Polish, and it was the first time in her life that she had ever used her own tongue for a scientific speech. Secondly, she attended a great ceremony in the museum where she had done her first Physics experiments. Thirdly, at a banquet given in her honour by Polish women, she discovered the old headmistress of her first school. Hurriedly, Marie made her way through the crowd to the old lady and kissed her on both cheeks. What joy that old head-mistress must have felt at the thought that her “old girl” was without question the most famous woman!

Marie had earned a holiday. She was going to spend it walking in Switzerland with a rucksack on her back and teaching Eve and Irène to climb and to treat crevasses with proper respect.

They had a friend with them who talked Physics so enthusiastically with Marie, that the children had to keep watch over him lest he, not they, should fall into a crevasse. They listened with surprise to the odd things he said to their mother, and laughed so much that there was no one to look after the crevasses.

“You see, Madame,” they heard him say, “what I need to know is: what exactly happens to the passengers in a lift when it falls in a vacuum?” The question seemed easy to answer to Eve and Irène and very amusing. They did not guess that they were listening to that incomprehensible subject called “Relativity,” for the careless friend was none other than the great Einstein.

At that time, Marie was becoming happier again, because the walls of Pierre's Radium Institute were growing in the Rue Pierre Curie. Dr. Roux, the head of the Pasteur Institute, had pro-posed two years before to raise the money for a laboratory for Madame Curie. That made the Sorbonne wake up to the fact that the Pasteur Institute was thinking of snatching their Madame Curie from them, and, to prevent such a catastrophe, they agreed with the Pasteur Institute to share in the building of the new laboratory.

Marie was full of joy. She helped to make the plans, discussed the shape of all the rooms and windows with the architect, and insisted on having immense windows and overflowing light. She also insisted on the garden and planted the trees and roses with her own hands before the building began, so that they might be making a little show when it was opened.

In July, 1914, she was able to read on the stone over the door:

Institut du Radium Pavillon Curie.

She tells us that she thought of Pasteur's words: “If you care for those conquests that are useful to men… if you are jealous of the part which your country may claim to have played in the spread of these marvels, take an interest, I implore you, in these sacred dwellings which we call laboratories. Ask that their numbers be increased, that they may be spler lid. They are the temples of the future, temples of true wealth and well-being. It is in them that man grows great, grows strong, and grows good. There he learns to read the works of Nature, which are the works of progress and universal peace; while his own works are too often barbaric and destructive.”

So thought Marie Curie, remembering Pasteur, as she watched Pierre's completed Institute of Radium, in July, 1914. The building was ready, but Marie would have to wait four years, four years of war, before she could see work begin in the Institute of Radium and Pierre's dream come true.