After Pierre Curie’s tragic death in 1906, the young widow, Marie with two daughters was offered the chair at the Sorbonne, which had been created for him. In 1911 Marie embarked on a highly charged love affair with Paul Langevin, who had been her husband’s student.
That same year she received a telegram: “You have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Letter follows. Svante Arrhenius” Secretary of the Swedish Academy. However, by this time there was a lively campaign against her because of her affair with Paul Langevin.
In a talk from 2011, Prof. John Stachel quoted from Curie’s correspondence with Arrhenius:
Curie writes to Arrhenius, suggesting perhaps she should not go to Stockholm. He replies, reassuring her she would be the guest of the nation. But then he writes again: “All my colleagues have told me that it is preferable that you not come here on December 10 … If the Academy had believed that” the letter from Curie to Langevin “might be authentic, it would not, in all probability, have given you the prize before you had given a plausible explanation that the letter is false”.
To which Curie replied:
“I do not believe it is up to me to surmise the intentions and opinions of the Academy. I must, therefore, act according to my convictions. In fact, the prize has been awarded for her discovery of Radium and Polonium. I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of my private life. … I cannot accept the idea in principle that the appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by libel and slander concerning private life”.
According to Prof. John Stachel in his lecture on Einstein and Marie Curie from 2011: The year 1911 ended for Marie Curie with a complete physical and mental breakdown: The newspapers in France were no longer full of the Langevin affair with her, but people remembered it, and nothing less than a world war would be necessary to erase it from their thoughts! She was therefore still at the mercy of the lowest sort of gossips!
Within a year of meeting Curie and Langevin, Einstein had embarked on his own extra-marital affair with his cousin Elsa in Berlin but there was no attendant publicity campaign against him at that time.
Well, he was Jewish, she was a woman, each of which led to discrimination, both within and beyond the scientific community…
In November 1911 Einstein wrote Curie a letter of support:
“Do not laugh at me for writing you without having anything sensible to say. But I am so enraged by the base manner in which the public is presently daring to concern itself with you that I absolutely must give vent to this feeling. However, I am convinced that you consistently despise this rabble, whether it obsequiously lavishes respect on you or whether it attempts to satiate its lust for sensationalism! I am impelled to tell you how much I have come to admire your intellect, your drive, and your honesty, and that I consider myself lucky to have made your personal acquaintance in Brussels. Anyone who does not number among these reptiles is certainly happy, now as before, that we have such personages among us as you, and Langevin too, real people with whom one feels privileged to be in contact. If the rabble continues to occupy itself with you, then simply don’t read that hogwash, but rather leave it to the reptile for whom it has been fabricated.
With most amicable regards to you, Langevin, and Perrin”.
Volume 8: The Berlin Years: Correspondence, 1914-1918 (English translation supplement)
After the Solvay Congress, from 1911 on, Einstein saw the trio Curie, Paul Langevin, Jean Perrin as a charmed circle, which he was allowed to enter during his Paris trips in 1913 and 1922. Prof. Stachel explains that they shared not only scientific interests, but they were politically close as hommes et femmes de gauche, whos views evolved towards a socialist approach to current economic problems (Stachel’s lecture, 2011).
Stachel, John, “Curie and Einstein: ‘Those tinsel-filled accounts that so often mask the lives of great creators’”, 2011.