Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one-Marie, the famous Madame Curie-and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.
No matter how carefully records are kept and filed and computerized, they grow fuzzy with time. Stories grow by accretion. Tales accumulate--like dust. The longer the time lapse, the dustier the history--until it degenerates into fables.
If all human beings understood history, they might cease making the same stupid mistakes over and over.