The lives Marie, her children, Pierre’s father and brother, and the Curies’ friends and colleagues had been shattered when the Curies’ extraordinary partnership came to a sudden and tragic end with the death of Pierre on 19 April 1906. In a simple, private ceremony attended only by his family and a few close friends, Pierre was interred beside his mother in the Curie family’s plot in Sceaux on the outskirts of Paris, where he grew up.
Marie was despondent by this devasting loss, but she refused to allow this to derail their work. Pierre’s brother, Jacques, had informed Marie the French government intended to support her and her daughters (Irène and Ève) with a state pension. Insisting she was quite capable of supporting herself and her children, she refused to entertain any notions she would become a ward of the state, and she returned to her work and research the day after the funeral, later explaining why:
“Crushed by the blow, I did not feel able to face the future. I could not forget, however,
what my husband used to say, that even deprived of him, I ought to continue my work.”
As a tribute to Pierre, Marie vowed to devote the rest of her life to completing the work they had started together. Her goal was to create a world-class laboratory (the laboratory they had only been able to dream of) in Pierre’s honor.
But first, she first needed to prepare for life without Pierre.
An unexpected offer
Although Marie sank into the depths of depression after Pierre’s tragic death and didn’t recover from this emotional blow for many years, she buried herself in her work and caring for her daughters.
On 13 May 1906, Marie received an unexpected offer from the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne. Faced with the dilemma of filling Pierre’s vacant chair and laboratory, and finding someone who was capable of teaching his courses, the logical choice was Marie; however, no woman had ever taught or held a faculty position at the prestigious university in its 756-year history. In Pierre’s memory—and in recognition of Marie’s impressive credentials, the university asked her to assume Pierre’s chair as professor of physics and chairman of the physical chemistry department. When she accepted their offer, Marie became the first woman professor at the Sorbonne. Although she was grief-stricken, she poured her energy into continuing their work, first becoming head of his laboratory at the Sorbonne and its first woman lecturer and professor. She was appointed to Pierre’s professorship in 1906 and became titular professor in 1908.
In her journal—obviously recognizing the bitter irony of this achievement—Marie wrote, “I have been named to your chair … there have been some imbeciles to congratulate me on it.”
Life without Pierre
In the summer of 1906, Marie moved with her daughters and father-in-law to Sceaux. She had much work to do to prepare to teach Pierre’s course, but first she needed to grieve and to ensure her daughters’ education would continue uninterrupted. Marie turned over her position at the Sèvres school for women teachers-in-training to her friend and colleague, Paul Langevin so she could focus on her research and her new position at the Sorbonne.
Marie tutored Irène, who showed remarkable aptitude for science and mathematics. She took steps to ensure Ève, who showed remarkable aptitude for language and the musical arts, received the training she needed to foster her talents. The grieving mother even made time to establish and run a cooperative school with several other parents who had professional scientific careers and disapproved of the French school system. Each family agreed to teach a class every week in the area of their specialty, so between 1906 and 1908, these children had the privilege of learning math, science, history, literature, and the arts from luminaries in their fields.
Marie’s first lecture
Over the course of the summer, Marie buried herself in her work and continued Pierre’s unfinished research on radiation and gravity, and radiation’s effect on nearby substances. Rather inopportunely, the Curies’ friend, Lord Kelvin[7], chose the summer of 1906 to publicly declare radium was not an element but was a compound of lead and five helium atoms—a theory which threatened the entire science of radioactivity—just as she was preparing to teach Pierre’s course. Marie rose to Kelvin’s challenge and added the goal of isolating radium (disproving Kelvin’s theory and solidifying her discovery in the process) to her long list of projects.
On 5 November 1906, Marie gave her first lecture to a standing-room-only crowd. Because this was such a ground-breaking event, hundreds of people gathered hours before her lecture. In addition to the students scheduled for Pierre’s class and Marie’s advanced Physics class from Sèvres (whom had been granted permission to attend her lectures because she could no longer teach their course), reporters, photographers, celebrities, colleagues, scholars, curious Parisians, and society ladies mobbed the lecture hall. Most attendees (most likely, the non-students) were hoping for a bit of drama, a tribute to Pierre, or a mention of the historic nature of the events; however, true to form, Marie—dressed in her typical simple black dress—picked up where Pierre had left off in his last lecture, and she spoke about physics and developments in the science over the past decade.