The Nobel prize-winning couple spent holidays and weekends at the home built in 1890 on the southwest outskirts of Paris, and critics argued on social media that Polish taxpayer money should not be spent on the home that costs $950,000 just because Curie briefly spent time there.
“This property was built in 1890 and was Pierre and Marie Curie’s holiday destination between 1904 and 1906. They (came) here during weekends, Easter holidays, summer holidays,” the head of local real estate agency Stephane Plaza, Daniel Cazou-Mingot, told the Associated Press on Wednesday. “There’s been no experiments done (on) this property.”
Poland’s right-wing government seeks to attain and uphold historical places and objects connected to the country’s history. On top of the home’s price, renovation costs are estimated at $240,000 since the home is in disrepair. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki tweeted this week that the home is “part of Poland’s history.”
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
Morawiecki said he’s given instructions for the government to buy the house in France.
The 120-square-foot stone-and-brick building is in Saint-Remy-les-Chevreuse. Some of its peeling wall-paper, its fireplaces and the floor tiles date back to the Curie times, according to Stephane Plaza.
It said that Polish-born Marie Curie may have painted some ceiling designs herself, but there is no proof of that.
The couple came with their daughters, Irene and Eve, said Cazou-Mingot.
One day in April 1906, Pierre headed back to Paris for an academic meeting and was hit and killed by a horse-drawn cart.
“After this accident, Marie Curie came back from time to time with her daughters and then she stopped coming,” and the house—with its 9,700-square-foot garden, 19th-century dovecote and water pump—was sold, Cazou-Mingot said.
Cazou-Mingot believes it will take “love at first sight and respect for the history of the property” for someone to want to invest in it.
Born in 1867 in Warsaw as Maria Sklodowska, the scholar moved to Paris in 1891 and was one of the first women to study science at the Sorbonne. She pursued a scientific career with her French husband. After Pierre’s death that vacated the Sorbonne’s physics chair, she was offered the job and became the first female professor at the renowned university.
In 1903, Marie and Pierre Curie and French scientist Henri Becquerel jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics for their studies on radioactivity.
Marie Curie also won the 1911 Nobel in Chemistry for discovering radium and polonium. The latter she named after Poland.
She died in 1943 in Passy, France, from radiation sickness. Marie and Pierre Curie are buried at the Paris Pantheon with other distinguished French citizens.
