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  They bantered back and forth as they made their way through the house to the yard. Even Monsieur Curie moved with greater purpose that afternoon. He was caught up in an animated conversation with Émile Borel, the mathematician. They both agreed that radioactivity was linked to the atomic proprieties of the elements, but how was the question. Borel was for changes within the atom. Curie was for energy from the outside acting upon it. Lucia was familiar with both these arguments because the doctor had explained them to her only the night before.

  Despite the fact that it was a celebration, the rest of the afternoon looked very much like any Sunday at the Curies’, with several conversations going on at once, usually about radium or radiation, departmental gossip, or politics. The guests were seated on blankets or wicker chairs in the shade of the sycamores. A line of lilac bushes followed the fence, the mounds of purple flowers pitted with rust. Here and there clumps of irises and lilies offered tilting wands of color. Beyond the fence was a ragged field of purple and green grasses dotted with red poppies, where the ground rose and fell into hillocks and gullies draped with thickets of yellow broom and gorse.

  There were a few new guests that day, notably Ernest Rutherford, a physicist, a New Zealander, who had been working in England under J. J. Thomson at Cavendish and then in Canada at McGill. He arrived with his wife and sauntered out to the yard, eventually settling down with Monsieur and Langevin next to Iréne’s tiny kitchen garden. He was a big man with a red moustache and a heavy jaw that was never still: talking, laughing, making sardonic comments embroidered with sly looks of amusement. His full lips barely covered his protruding teeth and even though he had large ears that stuck out on either side of his head he was still an attractive man: vigorous, buoyant, and impishly argumentative. When Lucia heard his name she remembered the New Zealander who tried to rob Madame Curie of her discoveries and had set her to sleepwalking. Now that she had won the race and isolated enough radium to determine the atomic weight, these two had become friends.

  Later on, while Madame Curie sat in a lawn chair with her mending, pushing and pulling the needle through with her ruined fingertips, Rutherford came over and stretched out beside her on a blanket. At first they chatted about the source of this mysterious energy and then about the possible medical uses for it. They both shared the same intensity of purpose, the same exhilaration, and dedication to detail. They both had a natural ability to push all extraneous concerns aside and focus on the one question at hand. It was obvious that despite his disregard for formalities, convention, and even manners, the New Zealander had a deep and abiding respect for Lucia’s mistress.

  The afternoon stretched on in a series of quiet calamities—Didi the cat ran out into the field chased by the Perrins’ dog. The children ran out after them scratching their bare legs on the broom and tripping over clods of grass. Four-year-old Aline caught her new dress on a thorn and pulled it free before she had time to think about the damage she was doing. She stood there in disbelief when she saw what she had done and ran to her mother, Henriette Perrin, who fussed and cooed over her, rubbed her scratched shins and kissed them. Henriette whisked the dress off over her daughter’s head and sent her out to play in her shift, while she brought the dress over to her best friend, Marie, who was already darning a muffler.

  Out in the road Borel was teaching his young wife, Marguerite, how to ride a bicycle. He was not a young man and had to struggle to keep up with her. He held on to the seat and ran beside her, shouting instructions at her, which only confused and frustrated her, until he slipped on the cobblestones and went down hard, gashing his knee on a sharp rock.

  He came into the yard looking stunned and helpless, his trouser leg rolled up to reveal his pale and bloody shin. Marguerite followed him out of the house with iodine and bandages and took care of the wound, prompting Rutherford to remark that even with a house full of doctors there was no one qualified to bandage him up. Monsieur Curie found this especially funny and let loose one of his braying laughs that rang out over the gathering.

  By four the ice cream arrived and the children were given as much as they wanted. Afterward, they gathered around Henriette to hear her stories, while her husband, having grown tired of arguing with Georges Sagnac about the nature of matter, burst into an aria from Das Meistersinger. Lucia went around gathering up the bowls and shooing away the flies. When she came over to Madame Curie and Rutherford, he handed her his bowl and then with a devilish grin asked her what she thought about the burning question at hand.

  “What question is that, monsieur?”

  “What makes the radium glow, my girl. Any idea?” He spoke French with an English accent that made it difficult to understand. Nevertheless, his intention was clear enough. He meant to have a little fun at her expense.

  Lucia stood there with three dirty bowls in her hand and frowned at the question. Madame Curie started to protest, but Lucia cut her off. “I’ll answer this, madame, if you don’t mind.” She pulled herself up, wishing there were some place to set the bowls down.

  “While the evidence is still inconclusive,” she said, peering down at her adversary with a look of studied indifference, “my opinion is that the energy is coming from some process of disintegration within the atom. I believe that is your theory as well, monsieur. Madame, on the other hand, is working on the continuous aether theory, a sort of glue that holds everything together. She imagines rays of energy filling the space around us and being absorbed only by certain heavier elements. Either way, Monsieur, atomist or aetherist, the question isn’t so much why does it glow, but rather what is the structure of everything.”

  Rutherford stared at her for a moment and then burst out laughing. “Well done, my girl. You’ve stuck it to me that time.” Then to Madame Curie he added: “Where did you find such a talent?”

  Madame Curie smiled briefly. “She’s been talking to Papa. Lucynka,” she said affectionately in Polish, “Jeste? mój genialny dziewczyna.” You are my genius girl.

  Lucia’s cheeks reddened with pleasure. It had been a long time since anyone had called her Lucynka. A moment later Madame Curie held out her hand and in Lucia’s confusion she thought her mistress was offering her hand to hold. Actually, she was directing Lucia’s attention to a stack of dirty bowls on a nearby chair.

  That evening Lucia served a light supper and afterward the party gathered out in the back to look at the stars. It was a dark night and the black expanse of sky was flecked with twinkling pinpricks. By now Lucia had learned many of the constellations and would have gladly called them out had anyone asked. Instead the company wanted to talk about radium: radon gas, the proprieties of radium, the industrial uses, the medical uses—radium, always radium. Monsieur Curie held up a vial of radium bromide that he had been carrying around all day in his pocket. “I give you radium,” he said momentously, the air seeming to quiver around him. Its blue glow lighted his face, which was animated with something akin to religious ardor. It also lit up his ruined fingers, raw and burned, irretrievably damaged, looking painful and even grotesque in the celestial light.

  In August the Curies took a house for the month near the shore in a little village called St. Trojan les Bains on Île d’Oléron, a small island located off the southwest coast of France in the Charente-Maritime. It was an idyllic spot, fringed with sandy beaches, dotted with coarse bent grass, and surrounded by wide swaths of oyster beds.

  The odd little cottage had a red tile roof and a blue door that had been freshly painted over peeling paint, so that now the surface was lumpy and already beginning to flake. It sat back from the dirt track amid piles of windswept pine needles and broken roof tiles, standing courageously with the other cottages on the road against the wind and the brackish sea air. A crudely lettered sign at the corner designated the lane as rue Docteur Geay. Lucia kept expecting to meet this doctor, but he never appeared, nor did anyone speak of him. It occurred to her that he was probably dead.

  What made the cottage strange was that they were not
alone. The owner, an old fisherman, was still living in it. He had moved his things down to the cellar at the beginning of the summer so he could rent out the rest of the house for extra money. He said he would be quiet and they would never know he was here, yet Lucia could hear him rattling around down there, coughing and swearing, and banging the cellar door whenever he went out.

  Although he made an effort to make his house comfortable for the paying guests, Lucia kept finding peculiar objects about the place that gave her pause. Hanging on the wall in the parlor was a framed label from a fishing crate showing a flying shrimp against a dead blue sky. The shrimp was grinning with a mouthful of white teeth. Fortunately, no one minded when she took it down and put it in the closet.

  In the kitchen an old bicycle wheel outfitted with fishing hooks hung from the ceiling, meant to hold pots and pans. Once she caught a finger on one of the hooks taking down a saucepan and never used the contraption again. There were other inventions too: A fishing bucket suspended over the sink delivered water through a rubber hose; a cane turned into a butterfly net, a flute, and an umbrella; a wooden box attached to a crank peeled potatoes, although she never figured out how it worked. Otherwise, the house displayed a certain crude domesticity; lace doilies sat on the backs of the chairs, shells decorated a lamp base.

  On most days Lucia helped the Curies down a series of footpaths to the water where they set up a camp on the beach. The bay was smooth and behaved like a well-mannered lake. Tiny wavelets lapped up on the shore and slapped against the fishing boats anchored nearby. On this particular morning Monsieur was voicing his usual complaint that he had on every vacation. “It seems to me a very long time since we have accomplished anything, Marie. Isn’t it time we got back to work?” They had been on the island for exactly five days.

  “Not yet, mon amour,” she murmured. “Let’s give it a while longer.”

  The Curies needed a long rest, that much was certain. Madame was pregnant and not well. Lucia could hear her being sick and not just in the mornings. The other day she found her mistress lying on a hooded lawn chair in the back under the pines with a colander of peas in her lap. She had a glazed look in her eyes, and a vague expression of exhaustion wilted her features.

  “She should be gaining weight, not losing it,” the doctor fretted to Lucia on the way down to the beach that day. “It’s been five months and the sickness should be gone by now. Her appetite is not what it should be and she sleeps badly. Her coloring is not good. I do not want to worry her, but these signs are not encouraging.”

  On most mornings Lucia stayed on the beach only long enough to set up the little encampment before returning to the house to begin her work. On that day she left the Curies under the umbrella and stopped off at the marina on her way home to pick up a bucket of oysters and a couple of whiting from the returning fishermen. Here at last was fresh fish they could afford, cod and whiting, bream and shellfish. Fish that was out of reach in Paris could be obtained for a few sou. She used the old recipes from the Babineauxes, exuberant, luxurious, a triumph every night. It felt good to be free in the kitchen with real ingredients, fresh herbs, vegetables, legumes, an array of choices.

  Still, she had to put up with the house. It was too small and there was a lot of work to do. The rest of the morning was spent making the beds, dusting, sweeping, and emptying the chamber pots, which had to be washed out and sprinkled with talc. She had gotten spoiled on boulevard Kellermann after Madame had won another chemistry prize and installed an indoor toilet.

  When it came time to start lunch she dragged a chair out to the porch, brought out a short knife and a little towel, and began to shuck the oysters. She was just about to pry open the second one when she happened to see a young man sauntering down the road carrying a tripod and a camera. He stopped at their gate and leaned over to speak to her. She thought he might be selling portraits or perhaps someone who had lost his way. He was handsome, a few years older than she, romantic looking, or so she thought. He had closely cropped light brown hair, a long narrow face, and a tawny moustache, taut and decisive, that gave him an air of authority.

  He introduced himself as Gabriel Richet. When he reached over to take her hand, she caught the faintest whiff of sweat, wild grass, and sea breeze, as if he had been lying in a field near the shore. He explained that he was a journalist from Le Matin and asked her if she was Madame Curie. She laughed at this and told him Madame Curie was her mistress and that she wasn’t at home.

  “You’re the maid then?”

  “The cook, monsieur,” she said curtly. That was how she referred to herself when speaking to tradesmen or other domestics in the neighborhood—although, in all honesty, she couldn’t name one cook who emptied chamber pots.

  When he found out that Madame Curie was out, he said: “Maybe you can help me?”

  “With what?”

  “I’m doing a general interest article on Madame Curie. Well, on both of them really, but mostly on her.”

  “In Le Matin?” Lucia looked surprised. The doctor was always reading that paper. She kept a stack of them by the stove in the parlor to light the fire.

  “Yes, and I’d like to take some photographs if she’ll let me.”

  Lucia laughed. She thought he was having fun with her. She noticed how blue his eyes were and how, for the moment, they stayed on her. She particularly liked the offhand way he leaned on the gate with an air of confidence, almost impertinence. Even though his eyes were still on her she got the idea that his attention was fleeting and that in a moment or two he would move on to something more interesting. He was careless and changeable—she could see that at a glance. Yet, instead of being cautious, as she should have been, she was drawn in. “My mistress in your newspaper? Why?”

  “She is a lady scientist. That’s something you don’t see very often. A Polish governess who marries a Frenchman, discovers radium, and receives a doctorate from the Sorbonne. You don’t think that will sell papers?”

  Lucia sat there with the oyster still in her hand too amazed and fluttery to open it. First there was this attractive man bristling with passion for his subject and then there was what he was saying. She recalled sitting in the parlor with Madame Curie sewing dresses for Iréne and talking about her mistress’s time as a governess for the Zorawskis in Szcuki. She was called Manya Sklodowska then, and she fell in love with the eldest son, who refused to marry her because she came from a poor family. There were other stories too of young Marie’s student days living on watery soup and sleeping in freezing garrets, fainting from hunger, and working until dawn. Lucia had seen the punishing work in the shed in rue Lhomond—the freezing cold, the snow and rain, the boiling mass, and the noxious fumes. There were prizes and acknowledgments along the way too. Lucia had known for quite some time that her mistress was extraordinary, but it hadn’t occurred to her that others would see her in the same way.

  “My mistress might like being in your newspaper, but my master”—she shook her head—“he won’t much like being famous.”

  When the Curies returned that afternoon and she told them about the journalist Madame Curie sat down, her face blank while she took it in. Monsieur Curie began to pace the room. “Well, I’m not going to be put in a paper,” he announced stubbornly. He strode off to the bedroom and came back with his laboratory notebook, slamming it down on the table. He pulled up a chair and hunkered down over the pages like an old war veteran perusing his dusty relics.

  After some time had passed Madame Curie seemed more amenable to the proposition. She appeared even eager to meet this journalist, asking twice when he said he’d be back. When he returned that afternoon Madame showed him out to the backyard where they sat for some time in the shade under the pines, discussing her work, or so it seemed to Lucia the few times she came out first with the tea and then the brioche and jam that she had made just for this occasion.

  When they finished Madame came in to coax Monsieur out to the yard so they could have their picture taken. Monsieur Richet
asked that Iréne be included, so she was awakened from her nap, grumpy, wrinkled, the marks of her pillow still on her cheeks, and made presentable for the photograph. He also wanted to interview Monsieur Curie, but he refused, saying he had work to do, even though they were on vacation and there was no laboratory to be had anywhere.

  It was a small house with thin walls, so Lucia could be forgiven for overhearing Monsieur complaining bitterly that night to his wife that he didn’t want to be famous, that he didn’t want the attention, the bother, and all that came with it. “It seems to me a very long time since we have accomplished anything,” he said, reverting to his old lament. “Isn’t it time we got back to work?”

  Over breakfast the next morning Madame Curie announced that she and Monsieur were going on a cycling excursion for three weeks and would be leaving in a few days. She said it as if it were a normal, everyday occurrence and needn’t be of concern to anyone.

  The doctor put down his cup and regarded her with a look of dismay. “How could you think about going on such a trip?” he asked incredulously. “What about your condition? What about Pierre? What about the pain in his joints?”

  “We’ve been getting stronger every day. And we won’t go far.”

  “This is madness.”

  “I think the cycling will do us good, Papa.” Pierre said.

  “Well, you are wrong, mon fils. You don’t need exercise. I thought that much was quite plain. You need rest and lots of it.”