Persons [ ] A Sensitive Apparatus | Eve & Marie Curie

Eve Curie, the daughter of the scientist Marie, at the piano, 1925 Horst P. Horst, Eve Curie (daughter of Madame Curie) playing the piano, 1938

“We discovered that peace at any price is no peace at all. We discovered that life at any price has no value whatever; that life is nothing without the privileges, the prides, the rights, the joys which make it worth living, and also worth giving. And we also discovered that there is something more hideous, more atrocious than war or than death; and that is to live in fear.”

”The radiation of radium was “contagious”—Contagious like a persistent scent or a disease. It was impossible for an object, a plant, an animal or a person to be left near a tube of radium without immediately acquiring a notable “activity” which a sensitive apparatus could detect.”

”Thus the radio elements formed strange and cruel families in which each member was created by spontaneous transformation of the mother substance: radium was a “descendant” of uranium, polonium a descendant of radium.”

Eve Curie, Madame Curie: a Biography, 1937

Marie Curie and her daughters Irene and Eve during a trip to the United States in the 1930’s

Ève Denise Curie Labouisse (1904-2007) was a French and American writer, journalist and pianist. Ève Curie was the youngest daughter of Marie Skłodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie.
She worked as a journalist and authored her mother’s biography Madame Curie and a book of war reportage, Journey Among Warriors. From the 1960s she committed herself to work for UNICEF, providing help to children and mothers in developing countries. She was a talented musician and has given concerts in London and America.

Although she loved her mother, Ève had a quite different personality from her (and from her sister Irène). She was not interested in science, preferring the humanities. Unlike her mother, she was always attracted by refined life. Whereas Marie usually wore simple, black dresses, Ève always cared about smart clothes, wore high-heeled shoes and make-up, and loved shining at parties. However, both Ève and Irène nursed their mother with devotion until her death. Marie, ill with aplastic anemia, probably caused by her long-term exposure to radium, died on July 4, 1934.