What killed Madame Curie?
I was called to investigate the recent death of a famous physicist: Marie Curie, born Manya Skłodowska. When I arrived on the scene, she was in her death-bed, her face long and grey, a ghostly shadow in the warm light of the mountain sanatorium. Her daughter Eve was there. “It’s so quiet,” she said, “so fearfully motionless—” We made our introductions, but she was obviously distracted. “So motionless, those hands. No longer nervously shaking, constantly moving, always working…” I took a look at the hands, still and limp on the bed. They were hardened, calloused, deeply burned and thick-skinned. “What is this?” I asked myself, but I must have said it out loud because Eve heard me. “Radium,” she said. “Radium?” “Those were her last words— ‘Was it done with radium or with mesothorium?’ As she was stirring her tea with a spoon— no, no, not a spoon, but a glass rod or some delicate laboratory instrument… She had drawn away from human beings; she had joined those beloved ‘things’ to which sh
