Marie Skłodowska Curie is the only woman who was put to rest in the Pantheon in Paris, a shrine for the great people of France. She was buried next to Pierre Curie. Everything is as it was in their lifetime, through foul and fair, at home and in science. But it started on 25 July 1895 when Marie Skłodowska, 28, a Sorbonne graduate from Poland, married Pierre Curie, 36, a professor of the Paris Municipal School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry. They had neither reception, nor rings. The bride had a new dress but it was dark and practical, meaning it could be worn to work. The newlyweds spent the money they had been given in honor of their wedding to buy two bicycles and went on a honeymoon touring through France. Then there were eleven happy years blessed by scientific discoveries and even the Nobel Prize for their radioactivity studies and Pierre’s early death beneath the wheels of a carriage. Maria lived many more years, received the second Nobel Prize, in chemistry this time, but she also met an untimely end. Spending all her life next to radioactive isotopes, she was not careful and even wore a radium cell on her chest as a sort of a charm.
