Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 21, 1995 TAG: 9504210109
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Medium
The ceremony at the majestic domed monument, draped with a huge French flag, was a symbolic triumph for French women's rights activists and a dramatic farewell gesture by President Francois Mitterrand.
Ailing with cancer as he completes the final weeks of his 14-year presidency, Mitterrand fulfilled a 1993 request from feminists that a woman be enshrined in the Pantheon.
On Mitterrand's order, the ashes of Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie, were transferred from a small-town cemetery and carried in wood coffins into the Pantheon. The couple shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903, and she won the chemistry Nobel in 1911.
They are the 70th and 71st people whose remains are enshrined at the Pantheon. One woman, Sophie Bertholet, is there alongside her husband, renown chemist Marcellin Bertholet. But Mitterrand stressed at the ceremony that Marie Curie is ``the first lady in our history honored for her own merits.''
Ironically, Marie Curie was a native of Poland, not France, and Polish President Lech Walesa joined Mitterrand at Thursday's ceremonies. Also present were Premier Edouard Balladur and Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac, conservatives vying to succeed Mitterrand in a two-round election that begins Sunday.
The woman they honored was born Marie Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867.
She came to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where she met her husband. With their discoveries of polonium and radium, ``they changed the face of the world,'' 1993 Nobel Physics laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes told the Pantheon ceremony.
During World War I, Marie Curie was involved in the first use of radiology to treat wounded and trained the army's radiologist nurses at what is now known as the Curie Institute.
by CNB