Marie Curie (1867-1934) disliked publicity and generally preferred to remain incognito when she traveled.


 Raymond Drux, her chauffeur for the last four years of her life, said that once, in a crowded restaurant in Caen, the owner recognized her and asked him:


"Isn't that Madame Curie, that woman?".


The chauffeur denied it, but the owner did not give up.


While Raymond and Marie were waiting for lunch, the man approached Madame Curie with the guest book, said her name out loud, so that all the other customers could hear, and asked her to sign.


"Madame Curie stood up without a word, left some money for the meal we had not eaten and decided to leave again," the chauffeur recalled.


When Marie Curie developed cataracts in 1920, she invented a whole series of tricks to be able to continue working while hiding her vision problems: she placed large colored marks on her instruments and took to writing her lecture notes in large letters.


When a student showed her an experimental photograph in which very thin lines appeared, the scientist resorted with extraordinary skill to a covert interrogation from which she extracted the information needed to mentally reconstruct the image.


Only then would she take the glass plate, evaluate it and pretend to observe the lines.


When surgery became necessary, she registered at the clinic as Madame Carré and sent her daughter Eve to get the large glasses she needed.


After the first operation, three more were added, all performed without her friends and colleagues knowing anything.


"No one needs to know that my eyes are ruined," Marie confided to Eve.


All this because the Polish physicist naturalized French did not want to arouse pity from anyone and did not even want the researchers in her laboratory to see her as an old and vulnerable woman. But above all, and this was perhaps the main reason that pushed her to take this attitude, she absolutely did not intend to surrender to her weaknesses.

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