The Age of Radiance Read Online Free Page B

teaching the farm’s eighteen peasant children how to read and write in Polish—an effort considered such a crime by Russian authorities it was punished with hard labor at a concentration camp. The Zorawskis paid Manya a good salary of five hundred rubles a year, and she would stay with them for four years. This job would change Manya’s future course in the world, but it also included “moments which I shall certainly count among the most cruel of my life.”
    The cruelty arrived when firstborn son Kazimierz (Casimir), studying mathematics and agricultural engineering at Warsaw University, returned home for the holidays. He quickly fell in love with the nineteen-year-old Manya, and she fell back, tail over teacup. In time, he told his parents they wanted to get married, and the young couple expected a happy consent. Everyone adored Manya. But, they were wrong. The parents believed their brilliant son was destined to marry above, not below, his station and forbade an engagement with this penniless nobody. Casimir agreed to his parents’ wishes, which made him seem weak to Manya, but she still loved him, and she couldn’t afford to quit a job that paid so well.
    Then, for a number of years, Casimir wavered, telling Manya he loved her and had to have her as his bride and, alternately, that he had to accede to his parents’ wishes. She wrote Henrietta on April 4, 1887,“If [men] don’t want to marry impecunious young girls, let them go to the devil! Nobody is asking them anything. But why do they offend by troubling the peace of an innocent creature?” On November 25, 1888:“I have fallen into black melancholy. . . . My existence strangely resembles that of one of those slugs which haunt the dirty water of our river. . . . I was barely 18 when I came here, and what I have not been through! . . . I feel everything very violently, with a physical violence, and then I give myself a shaking, the vigor of my nature conquers, and it seems to me that I’m coming out of my nightmare. . . . First principle: never to let one’s self be beaten down by persons or by events.”
    The tormented young woman tried drowning herself in her studies, reading ferociously after dinner every night—sociology, literature, history, even an advanced math course she completed, by mail, with help from her father. Repeatedly her interests and her talents were sparked by physics and chemistry, so much so that she convinced one of the factory chemists to give her lessons. Then the Zorawskis learned that Casimir and Manya were still illicitly seeing each other. She was fired. Completely heartbroken, Manya returned to Warsaw, lived with her father, worked at a few more governess jobs, and, through her cousin Joseph, got laboratory experience at the clandestineMuseum of Industry and Agriculture, where Joseph illegally educated a generation of Polish scientists.
    Then in March 1890, Manya received a letter from Bronya. The elder sister announced she was engaged to a very different Casimir—a man who would be deported to Siberia if he ever returned to the Russian empire, as he was believed to be one of the conspirators behind Czar Alexander II’s assassination—and that her studies were complete. Now it was Manya’s turn, and Bronya invited her littlest sister to come to Paris to live with the new couple and be supported financially, as promised so long ago. But now, Manya wavered, for she was still so much in love. Finally in the fall of 1891, Casimir Zorawski wrote to say that their relationship was categorically finished. Manya left Poland, for Paris.
    But this is not the end of that story. After growing up to become a well-regarded mathematician in Poland, the adult Casimir Zorawski would frequently be seen gazing up at Warsaw’s monumental statue of the nation’s great heroine, Marie Curie, the “penniless nobody” he had lost forever.

    B orn November 7, 1867, in the province of Vistula Land, a Poland brutally ruled by a