Samuel Johnson Is Indignant by Lydia Davis Page B

of his charm…
    What he does not know, when he mentions their shared future, is that he now has a rival. And what a rival! A laboratory.
    Where does she come from, this nervous young woman, who curiously combines timidity and assurance? It is a daughter of the earth, who has need of air, space, trees. She entertains with nature a relationship that is almost carnal. The plants know it and under her fingers blossom.
    What she denies, on the other hand, is her animal part. Her brief angers, for example, which betray like a bolt of lightning what she is controlling in the way of concealed storms.
    Poverty
    Now, however, her father is deprived of his attributions, loses the lodging that accompanies them and half of his appointments.
    How to join the two ends?
    He gnaws at himself. Ah!
    What afflicts her is not that she has only one dress which must be made over by a seamstress but that she does not see any way out of the tunnel in which she is engaged.
    Then she is rescued by her sister.
    Studies in Paris
    French science, whose milk Marie Sklodowska has come to Paris to suck, happily has one great man, Pasteur, who is reaching the end of his life.
    In Paris, she will spend her leisure time with her sister Bronia and Bronia’s own Casimir. Though they work hard they know how to amuse themselves, with Slavic hospitality. There are infinite discussions around the samovar and the piano in which they remake the world.
    They organize parties, put on amateur spectacles, tableaux vivants: a young woman draped in a garnet tunic, her blond hair falling over her shoulders, incarnates Poland breaking its bonds while Paderewski plays Chopin in the wings: it’s Marie, proud of having been chosen.
    But chatting pleasantly will never be her specialty.
    Austerity
    Her austerity sometimes borders on masochism. One night she is so cold in her fireless little room that she piles on her bed everything contained in her trunk along with a chair, while the water freezes in her basin.
    She sometimes faints from having fed herself exclusively on radishes and tea. Bronia and Casimir rescue her and a cure of beefsteak puts her to rights.
    Language
    A summer passes. She perfects her French. When classes resume, she has driven out all the “Polishisms” from her vocabulary. Only the gently rolled r’s will bear witness until her last day to her Slavic origins, adding a certain charm to her voice which does not lack it already. And, like all the world, she will always calculate in her mother tongue.
    License
    Not only does she pass her exam, but when the results are announced before all the candidates in order of merit, her name is spoken first. Marie Sklodowska is licensed in physical sciences by the University of Paris. And it is admirable.
    Courtship
    Did she even notice, on the eve of her exam, that Sadi Carnot, the President of the Republic, was stabbed in his carriage by an Italian militant anarchist?
    Perhaps she did not speak of it, even for an instant, with the physicist she has been seeing for several weeks, and who, as others offer chocolates, has brought her, when he has come to chat with her in her room, the offprint of an article titled “On symmetry in physical phenomena, the symmetry of an electric field and a magnetic field.” The brochure is dedicated “To Mlle Sklodowska with the respect and the friendship of the author P. Curie.”
    Together they speak enormously, but about physics or themselves.
    And, everyone knows, to tolerate a person telling you about his childhood it is necessary to be in love with him.
    Previous Loves
    Marie has not attained twenty-six years, soon twenty-seven, she has not lived three years in Paris without having met at Bronia’s, at the Faculty, at the laboratory, representatives of the male species sensitive to her attractions. An enamored Polish student had once thought to swallow laudanum to make himself interesting in her eyes. Marie’s reaction: “That young man