Augustino and the Choir of Destruction Read Online Free PDF

knowledge, sharpening her devotion to science all the while, and she would soon have a husband as brilliant and disinterested as herself, like kindred spirits meeting and fusing into one another, did she recall the young man she had met writing one day that there were few women of genius, or at least he had written, said, affirmed somehow, that women of genius were rare, the phrase she heard in the interweaving of marriage, the abandonment of marriage, but the young Marie Curie bowed her head and said nothing, she needed most of all to act, not to interrupt her thoughts, her inner discourse, also to be wary of a long tradition of prejudice when in the company of men, she would be no rival to her husband Pierre nor to anyone else, all feelings of rivalry would be banished, she must be mistress of herself, and how beneficial it would be, this rigour, uninterrupted self-discipline, bringing into the world two daughters, two Mélanies, one consumed by love of the pure sciences like her mother, a blazing and attractive replica, just as independent, straightforward, disinterested, and — like her mother — destroyed, sacrificed too soon to radioactivity, both working hard into the night in uncomfortable sheds, suffering from the dampness in the walls; Marie serious always, drably dressed, absorbed in her thoughts about uranium rays, orderly, minute, here in this shed, radium is treated exclusively, while the first little Mélanie was cutting her teeth, Marie Curie’s first daughter, later to be her own mother’s colleague, and whose studious shadow would in turn later haunt the laboratories in this shed, but before growing up, as Mère had done with her own daughter, Marie kept a diary recording the fifth, the sixth teeth to come through the baby’s gums, her bath in the pond, the cries as the child refused to drink milk, Irène cried today, I hope she’ll stop , though Mère thought Mélanie cried relatively little, at least wrote nothing to that effect in her own diary, along with the study of new rays, Marie had dated her discomforts shortly after Irène had been born, suddenly this phantom lesion diagnosed in the lung, it was this shed with walls that dripped humidity in autumn and winter, the stubborn adherence to work, still Pierre was by her side with so much to lighten her life, so close as the day wore on, a friend, a companion to go home with at night on foot or by bicycle, that too she had written in her diary at the same time as the baby’s teeth and tears, few words in a solid hand, a hundred-and-fifty times more active than uranium, then there was the phantom, the shadow of the lesion, atrophied lung and those fingers, why were they suddenly so chapped and swollen from handling murderous substances, Irène may have been her mother’s cherished one, but so was research as well, radioactivity is my life and my child as well, and what is my future life to be if not devoted to it, usually so discreet, this she confided to a disciple, a young girl who would study with her, she was mother to her work, a creation slow in coming to birth, and who knows if the student remarked on the bloodless face of her teacher there in that shed, that factory for heating poisons, that airless shed, heated by an iron stove in winter, and what was she to think of this diminutive woman, working silently on chemical operations amid the odours of gas burners, her creation on the point of consuming her at the very moment her daughter Irène needed her at home, working on her first teeth, crying ceaselessly, later her mother was to say I’ll tolerate no cries of sadness or of joy, my husband and children must be silent, no, no noise at all, and Mère thought that if Mélanie had cried very little, it was because her mother was always with her, no, Mère was wrong about that, Mélanie had cried the day her parents divorced, the day her grandmother was buried, when the distance between her