This new professorship was not established without a few difficulties. The first project had provided for a new chair, but not for a laboratory. And Pierre Curie felt that he could not accept a situation which involved the risk of losing even the mediocre means of work that he then had, instead of offering better ones. He wrote, therefore, to his chiefs, that he had decided to remain at the P.C.N. His firmness won the day. To the new chair was added a fund for a laboratory and personnel for the new work (a chief of laboratory, a preparator, and a laboratory boy). The position of chief of laboratory was offered to me, which was a cause of very great satisfaction to my husband. It was not without regret that we left the School of Physics, where we had known such happy work days, despite their attendant difficulties. We had become particularly attached to our hangar, which continued to stand, though in a state of increasing decay, for several years, and we went to visit it from time to time. Later it had to be pulled down to make way for a new building for the Physics School, but we have preserved photographs of it. Warned of its approaching destruction by the faithful Petit, I made my last pilgrimage there, alas, alone. On the blackboard there was still the writing of him who had been the soul of the place; the humble refuge for his research was all impregnated with his memory. The cruel reality seemed some bad dream; I almost expected to see the tall figure appear, and to hear the sound of the familiar voice. Even though Parliament had voted the creation of a new chair, it did not go so far as to consider the simultaneous founding of a laboratory which was, nevertheless, necessary to the development of the new science of radioactivity. Pierre Curie therefore kept the little workroom at the P.C.N., and secured as a temporary solution of his difficulty the use of a large room, then not being used by the P.C.N. He arranged, too, to have a little building consisting of two rooms and a study set up in the court. One cannot help feeling sorrow in realizing that this was a last concession, and that actually one of the first French scientists never had an adequate laboratory to work in, and this even though his genius had revealed itself as early as his twentieth year. Without doubt if he had lived longer, he would have had the benefit of satisfactory conditions for his work, but he was still deprived of them at his death at the premature age of forty-eight. Can we fully imagine the regret of an enthusiastic and disinterested worker in a great work, who is retarded in the realization of his dream by the constant lack of means? And can we think without a feeling of profound grief of the waste--the one irreparable one--of the nation's greatest asset: the genius, the powers, and the courage of its best children?