Marie Curie was able to begin work. Their mutual passion for science brought them increasingly closer, and they began to develop feelings for one another. Eventually Pierre Curie proposed marriage, but at first Skłodowska did not accept as she was still planning to go back to her native country. Curie, however, declared that he was ready to move with her to Poland, even if it meant being reduced to teaching French. Meanwhile, for the 1894 summer break, Skłodowska returned to Warsaw, where she visited her family. She was still laboring under the illusion that she would be able to work in her
Marie Curie and Pierre: the curie. Nevertheless, in 1911 the French Academy of Sciences failed, by one or two votes, to elect her to membership in the Academy. Elected instead was Édouard Branly, an inventor who had helped Guglielmo Marconi develop the wireless telegraph. It was only over half a century later, in 1962, that a doctoral student of Curie's, Marguerite Perey, became the first woman elected to membership in the Academy. Despite Curie's fame as a scientist working for France, the public's attitude tended toward xenophobia—the same that had led to the Dreyfus affair—which also fueled false speculation that Curie was