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266
SÖNYA KOVALÉVSKY
Shortly after she returned to Stockholm, and during
the autumn months, she lived in a perpetual state of
overexcitement and exertion, which broke down her
health for a time.
This year (1888) was, she had long been forewarned,
to bring her to the summit of success and happiness.
It bore within it, also, the germ of all the sorrows and
misfortunes which were to break upon her with the
new year. But that Christmas, at the solemn session
of the French Academy of Science, she received in
person the Prix Bordin, the greatest scientific honor
which any woman has ever gained; one of the
greatest honors, indeed, to which any one can aspire.
The man in whom she had found such " full
satisfaction," as she declared; in whom she found all that
her soul thirsted for, all that her heart desired, was
present on that occasion. At that supreme moment
all she had dreamed of as the highest joy of life became
hers. Hers was the highest acknowledgment of her
genius; hers the object of her truest devotion.
But she was the princess in whose cradle the fairies
had placed all good gifts, which were always fated to
be neutralized by the baneful gift of the single jealous
fairy. She indeed gained all that she most desired,
but it came at the wrong moment, and under
circumstances which embittered it to her. In the midst of
her intense striving for the prize which her scientific
friends knew was a matter of honor for her to win,
there had come into her life this new element—an
element for which she had often longed.
During the last few months before the essay was
despatched to Paris she had lived in a frightful state
of excitement, torn by two conflicting claims—she
was at once a woman and a scientist. Physically she
nearly killed herself by working exclusively at night;
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