"... In order to realize our irreparable loss we must remember Curie's attachment to his students.... Some of us offered him, with reason, a veritable worship.... For myself, he was, next to my own family, one of those I loved most. How well he knew how to surround his simple collaborator with a great and tender affection. His immense kindness extended even to his most humble helpers, who adored him. I have never seen more sincere and more heart-breaking tears than those shed by the laboratory boys on the news of his sudden death."
Paul Langevin:
"... The hours when one could meet him and in which one loved to talk about his science and in which one thought with him, return each day to recall his memory, to bring back his kindly and thoughtful face, his luminous eyes and his beautiful, expressive head modeled by twenty-five years passed in the laboratory, and by a life of unremittent work and complete simplicity.
"... It is in his laboratory that my memories, still so recent, most readily bring him back to me, as he would appear to those near to whom he had grown older, scarcely changed by the eighteen years that have passed since. Timid and often awkward, I began under him my laboratory education....
"Surrounded by apparatus for the greater part conceived or modified by himself, he manipulated it with extreme dexterity, with the familiar gestures of the long white hands of the physicist....
"He was twenty-nine years old when I entered as a student. The mastery which ten years, passed entirely in the laboratory, had given him, imposed itself even on us, despite our ignorance, by the surety of his movements and explanations, and the ease, shaded by timidity, of his manner. We returned always with joy to the laboratory, where it was good to work near him because we felt him working near to us in that large, light room filled with apparatus whose forms were still a little mysterious to us. We did not fear to enter it often to consult him, and he sometimes admitted us, too, to perform some particularly delicate manipulation. Probably my finest memories of my school years are those of moments passed there standing before the blackboard where he took pleasure in talking with us, in awakening in us fruitful ideas, and in discussions of research which formed our taste for the things of science. His live and contagious curiosity, the fullness and surety of his information made him an admirable awakener of spirits."
I have wished above all, in gathering together here these few memories, in a bouquet reverently placed upon his tomb, to help, if I can, to fix the image of a man truly great in character and in thought, of a wonderful representative of the genius of our race. Entirely unfranchised from ancient servitudes, and passionately loving reason and clarity, he was an example—as is a prophet inspired by truths of the future—of what may be realized in moral beauty and goodness by a free and upright spirit, of constant courage, and of a mental honesty which made him repulse what he did not understand, and place his life in accord with this dream.
[14]From the great number of letters and telegrams of condolence, I quote, as examples, these lines written by three great scientists, today no longer living.
From M. Berthelot:
"MADAME:
"I do not wish to wait longer without sending you the sympathetic expression of my profound grief and of that of French and foreign scientists on the occasion of the common loss with you that we have all experienced. We were struck as by lightning by the tragic news! So many services already rendered science and humanity, so many services that we awaited from that genial inventor: all this vanished in an instant, or become already but a memory!"