Madame Curie

Madame Curie Summary | Part 1: Chapter 1 Summary

Inside a Gymnasium at a boys' high school in Warsaw, four children are playing war with wooden blocks. They are: Joseph, Bronislava ("Bronya"), Helen ("Hela"), and the youngest, five-year-old Marya ("Manya"). These are the children of Monsieur Vladislav Sklodovska, professor of physics and under-inspector of the school. The Sklodovskas have lived at the school since shortly after Manya's birth.

Both Monsieur and Madame Sklodovska are wellborn and intelligent, their families part of the land-owning minor Polish nobility now suffering from the rule of the Russian empire. A century earlier, both families might have lived comfortably as farmers, but with the estates having grown poorer and poorer, education has now become the ideal. Madame Sklodovska received a good education at a private school in Warsaw, and then became a teacher and finally director of the same school, a post she left shortly after Manya was born; Monsieur Sklodovska followed in his father's footsteps, attending the University of St. Petersburg before returning to teach mathematics and physics.

However, Russian control of Poland intrudes especially into the quiet atmosphere of the schools, where Polish children are taught in Russian and Polish teachers have to bow to Russian administrators upholding the dictates of the Tsar. Among the Polish "intelligentsia," revolt is always near the surface, and Monsieur Sklodovska is representative of the Polish teachers torn between exerting what influence they can over their nation's children and preserving their own livelihoods. This tension is manifested in Monsieur Sklodovska's continuing conflict with the Russian principal of the school, who wants Monsieur Sklodovska to be more subservient.

Even at her young age, Manya feels these tensions, picking up words like "police," "Tsar," "deportation," and "plot" from snippets of conversation. Although she does not yet understand their real meaning, the words frighten her, and she withdraws whenever she hears them in a conversation. But in her first five years, the political conflict is overshadowed for Manya by other, more personal fears. Her desire to read, and her precocity, frightens her parents, and Manya is afraid she will never be forgiven for figuring out on her own how to read. Finally, her mother is seriously ill with tuberculosis, a condition that keeps her from touching Manya or the other children most of the time. Because of her mother's illness, Manya is cared for much of the time by her eldest sister, eleven-year-old Sophie ("Zosia"). When alone, Manya withdraws into herself, wandering into the family workroom where she likes to look at her father's physics apparatus, housed in a glass case. She does not know what the objects are, but they fascinate her, and looking at them raises her spirits.