Told to stay home, she went to Stockholm

In November 1911, Marie Curie learned she had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering radium and polonium. That same week, French newspapers were attacking her over a relationship with the physicist Paul Langevin, who was separated from his wife.

Crowds gathered outside her home in Paris. The press called her a foreign homewrecker. Svante Arrhenius, a member of the Nobel committee, wrote suggesting she should not come to Stockholm to accept the prize while the scandal continued.

She wrote back that the prize had been awarded for the discovery of radium and polonium, and that she saw no connection between her scientific work and the facts of her private life. She could not accept, she said, that the value of scientific work should be judged by slander.

In December she travelled to Stockholm with her sister and her daughter Irène and gave her Nobel lecture. She became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes, and she is still the only person to win them in two different sciences.