Seventy-two years earlier, a woman mourns her dead husband, Eugène, and recalls that he once brought her an armful of wildflowers on a beautiful spring day, just hours before his sudden death. She says that she has since become fluent in the “language of the dead” (190) and now sees and hears “signs” from him: “a flicker of light between the trees, […] a bird sitting for long minutes on a branch beside me, unafraid” (190).

She goes on to reminisce about their first meeting, which occurred at a dinner party in 1903 at the home of the physicist Paul Langevin; this gathering was meant to celebrate the fact that the scientist Marie Curie had achieved her doctorate. 

Hearing the Curies discuss both spiritualism and their experiments with radioactivity, the speaker wondered if the dead, in their abstract “domain,” might retain some glimmer of “desire” for their lost corporeal senses, just as pitchblende ore hides luminous radium. During an argument about the famed spiritualist Madame Palladino, whose séances had been carefully monitored by Pierre Curie and others with scientific devices to descry any fraud, Pierre called for an open mind, opining that “science must never disclose what it does not understand” (191).