The Age of Radiance Read Online Free PDF

sell their country home, but at least some of their friends and relatives still had estates, where they were invited to spend the summers, tramping the woods for mushrooms and whortleberries, playing dress-upas traditional peasants, riding horse-drawn sleighs, and waltzing at night to fiddlers on the lawn. Manya:“We sleep sometimes at night and sometimes by day, we dance, and we run to such follies that sometimes we deserve to be locked up in an asylum for the insane.”

    T raveling as economically as possible, Manya Skłodowska left Warsaw for Paris carrying not only enough food and reading for the trip, but also a folding chair and a blanket, as German fourth-class travel did not include seats. She then joined Bronya and her husband at their apartment on the rue d’Allemagne at the city’s edge in smelling distance of la Villette, the abattoir. Twice a day the small, young foreign woman climbed the spiral staircase of a horse-drawn double-decker omnibus for the hour-long commute to and from the Sorbonne. The top section, open to the elements and known as the imperial, held the cheapest seats, with the best views. It was impossible, but she was in Paris, taking classes at the finest university in all of continental Europe. She filled out her registration card not as Marja or Manya, but as Marie Skłodowska, half-French, and half-foreign, with a surname no one but a Pole could pronounce—regardless, everyone who knew her forever called her Manya. Marie’s educational background and laboratory experience were dramatically scantier than that of her fellow classmates, and she struggled to keep up with schooling and with the mysteries of the French tongue. Stubborn, shy, dressed in the gray-wool-and-pomegranate-linen dress of a poor immigrant scraping through life, Marie was nevertheless a striking woman, with ash-blond hair and porcelain complexion. She was so pretty that one of her friends told a group of boys to leave them alone or risk a beating from her parapluie .
    Bronya and Casimir turned their apartment into petite Pologne , with every night a gathering of homesick Varsovians in exile, enjoying wine, cake, vodka, tea, and a piano player by the name of Ignaz Paderewski, all in heated conversation over science and politics—two future presidents of Poland were among the regulars. It was a glorious reminder of home, and it was also too much of a distraction for an overburdened university student. After six months, Marie moved into a sixth-floor chambre de bonne —a one-room garret—at 3 rue Flatters off boulevard de Port-Royal in the quartier latin , paying twenty-five francs a month, with no hot water as she couldn’t afford heat. Sometimes, she fainted from hunger. Her first real adult home had a folding iron bed, a white wooden table, a big brown trunk (which could be sat on in an emergency), an oil lamp, a stove, an alcohol-fed oven, a washing tub, onefork, one knife, one spoon, one cup, one cooking pan, two plates, and one teakettle with three glasses for herself and her only guests, the relatives. She knew how to sew, but never made herself any clothes, only repairing her Polish outfits again and again. On nights when it was too cold to sleep, she put everything she owned—clothes, coats, towels—on top of her coverlet, then put the single chair on top of all of it to weigh everything down and perhaps give at least the illusion of warmth.“My situation was not exceptional; it was the familiar experience of many of the Polish students whom I knew,” she wrote later. “I carried the little coal I used up six flights. . . . I prepared my meals with the aid of an alcohol lamp. . . . It gave me a precious sense of liberty and independence. . . . [This was] one of the best memories of my life.”
    After all her troubles as a university student, undereducated because she was a woman and foreign-born, Marie finished first in her master’s-degree physics course in the summer of 1893 and second in math