Biography | Marie Curie — The First Woman Laid Here on Her Own Merit

People treat the Panthéon as the place Marie Curie was always going to rest.

For sixty-one years she lay at Sceaux, beside Pierre, in a suburban cemetery.

On 20 April 1995 their coffins were carried up this hill. Science students bore the oak boxes down a white carpet to the steps. François Mitterrand presided. Lech Wałęsa stood for Poland. Ève Curie, the surviving daughter, was there.

The inscription over the porch still reads Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante. Sophie Berthelot had already been buried inside, as the wife of Marcellin Berthelot. Marie Curie was the first woman placed here for work of her own.

The decree had been published on 14 April. The coffins lay in state under the dome, then went into crypt 8. The lining is lead. Notebooks and papers from the old laboratories remain radioactive enough that archives still issue them in boxes.

This is not the death. Death was on 4 July 1934 at Sancellemoz. This pin is the republic deciding, late, that the woman who isolated radium belonged under the same dome as Voltaire and Hugo.

The visitor stands on the forecourt, not in the crypt. The crypt has hours and a queue. Quiet is the rule around the other tombs.

Photo: Panthéon exterior, Wikimedia Commons. Portrait of Marie Curie by Henri Manuel, c. 1920, public domain.