Summary

Just as she has her entire life, Marie Curie continues to work despite the complaints of her body. She is stricken with illness, first detected in her gall bladder, then in a series of dizzy spells and fever. For some time she has planned to build a villa at Sceaux, but she puts off doing so until it becomes clear she is near the end. Finally bedridden, Marie's doctors suggest a sanatorium in the mountains to help cure what looks like bronchitis, which she never reaches. She succumbs to her illness with Eve at her side. Later, a fellow professor determines that the true cause of death was the thing she discovered -- radium. The biography ends by describing her grave, entombed with Pierre Curie, and the book on radioactivity she so frantically worked on through the...