The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie themselves felt the oversight. “Among ourselves, there was obviously never any question about who was whom from the moment that we could sense ourselves to be individuals,” they said. “We could not understand how anyone could be so foolish as to mistake one for another.”

  For those who took the time to study the girls closely, there were ample physical cues to distinguish them from one another, like the singular symmetry of Cécile’s face, or the way Yvonne’s cheeks scrunched her eyes into something almost like a squint when she smiled. Annette had an uneven tooth, and dimples. Marie’s forehead was the narrowest, giving her face a diamond-like shape, while her subtly drooping eyelids sometimes made her appear drowsy. Émilie had the broadest smile and the lushest eyebrows. She also lacked her sisters’ chubby cheeks, rendering her face more elfin than babyish.

  Even in still photographs, sparks of personality announced the girls’ individuality more and more strongly as they grew. Careful observation revealed that Marie often tilted her head and shot a wry half smile at the camera. From the time she was an infant, Yvonne had a way of looking up through her extra-dark eyelashes that suggested a hint of concern, or wariness. A certain lift of the eyebrows marked Annette’s expression, as though the camera always managed to snap just as a delightful surprise had popped into her view, lending her face a particular sparkle and vivacity. Even with the corners of her mouth turned down, she might appear to be on the verge of giggling. Cécile, on the other hand, exuded serenity with her steady gaze and soft smile. The most outgoing of all, Émilie had a habit of looking the camera straight in the eye, sometimes with her lips pressed into a flat, sly grin that seemed to warn of impending mischief.

  But the public’s fascination with the Dionne Quintuplets was not with their differences. In newspaper and magazine articles, the subtleties of their five distinct personalities were reduced to single characteristics: the leader, the coquette, the thoughtful one, the prankster, the baby. “We were treated as five who really amounted to one, five of a kind so close to each other and alike in every respect that we were virtually indistinguishable. We could not possibly have separate identities or desires.” When they appeared in the observatory playground or before the cameras, they were always dressed alike. Wearing identical clothing looked like great fun to their fans, but for the sisters themselves, it felt like wearing uniforms.

  “I suffered a lot when young,” Cécile said. “We were all always together and people were there looking at us and I knew all the time that nobody was going to say, Hey, hello, Cécile! No. It was only, Hey, the quints! And that was very difficult to accept.”

  Yet in their sisterhood was a unique strength and comfort. Nothing in their lives provided such love, trust, and constancy. More than anything else, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie would rely on their indelible bond to see them through the tumultuous years to come.

  Only days after they turned nine in 1943, the most fundamental aspects of the life Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie had known began a dizzying reversal.

  Dr. Dafoe was dead. He had survived colon cancer and a long-neglected case of diabetes only to be felled by a sudden bout of pneumonia on June 2. The Little Doc had just celebrated his sixtieth birthday. The press reported that Émilie said, “We will ask God to take care of his soul,” but in truth, the news of Dafoe’s death was kept from the sisters for six months. The doctor had been a more prominent father figure to the girls than their own father, but when Oliva finally told them Dafoe was gone, they concealed their sadness, “because we knew, without being told, what Dad wanted us to feel.”

  * * *

  —

  One hundred yards to the west of the nursery, a Georgian mansion of yellow bricks neared completion. The opposite of the farmhouse in every way, it boasted nineteen rooms, nine bathrooms, bedrooms for maids and a nurse, a two-car garage, and a fully modern sparkling-white kitchen with a walk-in refrigerator. A large oil painting of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie—artwork from a 1940 calendar—hung over the mantel at one end of the thirty-foot living room. There was a music room, and a library paneled in knotty pine for Oliva, with a crystal chandelier, black marble fireplace, and leather couches. Beneath the foyer’s lantern-shaped light fixtures, a dark walnut stairway curved past a statue of the Madonna set into a window niche. Upstairs were two bedrooms for the boys and four for the girls, with a bathroom connecting each pair. Each of the girls’ rooms was done up in morning glory chintz—one in pink, one pale turquoise, one canary yellow, and one dark blue. Bellpulls in each bedroom rang in the nurses’ room. The basement, with its Ping-Pong table, fireplace, and second kitchen, belonged entirely to the children.

  “It cost me $75,000, not including the furniture,” Oliva liked to say (over $800,000 in US currency today). In fact, it had likely cost him nothing. Funds for the Big House came out of his daughters’ trust. Unaware that they themselves were paying for a home they did not desire from a bank account they did not know they possessed, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie watched the construction with trepidation.

  “The fable was that we had always felt, up to this moment, like institutional children, separated by cruel law from the rest of the family,” the sisters recalled. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Never in their lives had they wished to leave the nursery. “It was a haven to us, not a prison. It was familiar and friendly, the place where we had laughed so much more often than cried.” It was not a house, yet it was home. Only one thing about the Big House mirrored the nursery: its locked gate and barbed wire–topped fence.

  Almost twenty-two months passed between the February 1942 groundbreaking and the day the Dionnes moved in—November 17, 1943. War shortages had made building materials hard to come by, delaying construction again and again. Oliva had waited to move his family in until every last detail was in place, as though something as trifling as an unpainted doorjamb or an out-of-place ashtray might jeopardize the success of the reunion he had battled so long and hard for. Yet to Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie, the move to the Big House seemed to occur in a heartbeat. “Like that,” Cécile said as Yvonne snapped her fingers at the memory. “Without being prepared.”

  * * *

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  Determined to integrate the two halves of his family, Oliva Dionne immediately introduced new patterns to keep “the little girls” from forming a separate cluster within the household. No longer would they sleep all together in a single room. Annette and Cécile were given the yellow bedroom, Yvonne and Émilie the turquoise one. That left Marie to share the pink room with ten-year-old Pauline. They were not to sit next to one another at the table, either. That first night when the two dining room tables were pushed together, each of the five girls found herself positioned between two unfamiliar siblings.

  “Now, we’re one big family,” Oliva announced at dinner. “No more divisions. You little girls, you have to stop seeing yourselves as quintuplets. Look how we’ve seated you at the table: here, each of you is one child among twelve. Not one among five, one among twelve. I’ve always wanted all my children to be treated the same.”

  However well-intentioned Oliva’s efforts might have been, they backfired. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were too disoriented by so many sudden, drastic changes to open their tight circle. “Every instinct urged us to keep to ourselves, to shy away from these brothers and sisters whom we did not know very well,” they said. Communication was difficult, for the younger girls had been taught French almost exclusively, while their father and siblings favored English. (Though Elzire understood enough English to enjoy American radio programs, she did not speak it.) “We clearly seemed as strange to the family as they did to us. Some of them seemed to go out of their way to say wounding things about us, about how they all had been happier before we came into their lives.”

  “These we
re very hurt people,” a friend explained of the family’s strained relationship. “On both sides….There was resentment all the way around. There had to be some love as well. But the resentment, I think, sort of overshadowed that.”

  * * *

  —

  Nothing in the Big House was turning out as Oliva Dionne had pictured it. Instead of healing his family, the longed-for, dreamed-of reunion was opening fresh wounds—on both sides of the divide. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie had moved only a hundred yards, yet in a very real sense they were experiencing a rude dose of culture shock. Not only the language, but the atmosphere, the routine, and the expectations in the Dionne household all were miles apart from what the girls had known in the Dafoe Hospital.

  For the first time in their lives, Canada’s princesses had responsibilities beyond hanging up their washcloths and clearing their plates from the table. Now they were expected to pitch in with everything from washing dishes and scrubbing toilets to milking cows and shearing sheep. If they did not obey, or if their work did not meet the family’s standards, there were consequences that contrasted bluntly with the toy-stocked isolation room at the nursery.

  In the Big House, discipline could be accompanied by sharp words, or a swat. Spanking and verbal reprimands were very much the norm in the world beyond the Dafoe Hospital, but these tactics were entirely foreign to Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. For almost a decade they had been surrounded by soft-spoken nurses who weren’t allowed to kiss them, much less paddle them. “If we spanked one of those kids the whole world would yell at us,” Dr. Dafoe had said years earlier.

  Now that Oliva and Elzire finally had control of their daughters, they exerted it in full measure. “In each other’s presence, they competed to see who could treat us more strictly,” the sisters remembered. “There was no end to their instructions to do this or not do that.”

  A side of their mother that had scarcely been glimpsed before surfaced as nine years of stifled pain, resentment, and frustration bubbled up from behind Elzire’s sweet-faced exterior. “For sure, the grief ruined her health, not to mention her character,” the girls remembered one of their brothers saying. “She has no patience left.” Everything Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie did wrong, or perhaps only differently, was a reminder to Elzire that her daughters had been raised by strangers. “Did a nurse tell you to do that?” she might reproach them. When irritation ignited something deeper, a swift backhand from Elzire could send one of her daughters reeling to the floor, as Yvonne learned when she tried to intervene to protect Émilie and Marie from their mother’s temper. “I think sometimes she didn’t realize what she was doing,” Yvonne said later. “She had to take it out on somebody.” The words their parents used in anger were as painful as the blows. Brat. Stupid. Crazy. Dirty pig. “If I’d raised you, you’d be normal, like the others,” Yvonne remembered her mother saying.

  Beneath their own throbbing emotional wounds, Oliva and Elzire still desperately craved their daughters’ love. “The most important lesson, to be learned immediately now that we were all together away from outsiders’ eyes, was to show beyond doubting that we truly loved our parents,” the sisters recalled. “Somehow it had to be proved to them that the years of turmoil and struggle had been worth the cost.” At Oliva and Elzire’s insistence, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie dutifully kissed their parents good night each evening. If they forgot, they were marched downstairs to line up and complete the ritual. For the girls, it was as mechanical as shaking hands with a visiting dignitary, or kissing a bishop’s ring.

  Guilt permeated the girls’ every memory of life in the Big House. “We were convinced that we had brought misery and nothing else upon people whom we ought to love,” they remembered. They sensed it in their parents, too, who “behaved toward each other as though they had been partners in some unspoken misdeed in bringing us into the world.”

  The sisters’ unhappiness in their new home was so profound, it spawned an almost unspeakable desire. “If only I could have been a single child,” Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie each whispered before falling asleep.

  * * *

  —

  Their brothers and sisters remembered the reunion entirely differently. “Their return was a true celebration,” Thérèse said. For Thérèse, memories of life in the Big House were infused with music. “At our home, for example, we sang almost all the time while working or simply for the pleasure of singing….” After chores, there were evening card tournaments, dances, games, and more songs. Thérèse also had fond memories of Elzire, whom she always counted on for a sympathetic ear and good advice. “My mother didn’t have a lot of education, but she had a wisdom that was instinctive,” Thérèse said. “Beat us? Throw us to the ground? I never saw her do such things!” The very idea that Elzire could be physically violent toward her own children disturbed Thérèse deeply. “Despite all that she had to endure, she could still smile through the tears.”

  Like Thérèse, Victor could remember his five sisters joining in on parties he had at home, if only to tease his friends from the sidelines. Their brother Daniel’s wife, Audrey, also recalled noticing that Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie kept their distance from the rest of the family. “Yet there was lots of joy in that house,” Audrey Dionne added. “Christmas—that was real family life, something like I had never seen before. It was a beautiful time of the year, and I always looked forward to Christmas with them….And in the summertime—we used to play baseball and take long walks and pick berries, and there were always sing-alongs and home movies. And at night we would get together and pray in front of the big statue. It was a good life.”

  The Dionne children’s memories are so at odds, they might have been living with two different sets of parents, in two different houses. In a sense, they were. Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, Pauline, Oliva Jr., and Victor had entirely different feelings toward one another, and toward their parents, than their little sisters did. The girls themselves knew it. “We had been ordered to mix with our brothers and sisters as if we were ordinary members of the family, but neither they nor we believed this to be true. There was a difference in us, no matter how we regretted it.” On this point, at least, all of Oliva and Elzire’s children could agree. “We were raised to live a normal life,” Thérèse said. “For them, there were five nurses and five children. We just didn’t have the same background.”

  Dr. Dafoe and the Province of Ontario had begun with the purest of intentions. A germ-free cocoon to fend off potentially deadly infection. A guardianship arrangement to thwart those who would jeopardize the babies’ health for the sake of profit. A hospital to provide the fragile infants with the very best care science could offer. Yet everything they did to protect Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s lives had simultaneously widened the breach between the girls and their family until it was too broad to bridge. The Dionnes had ceased to be a single family from the moment Nurse de Kiriline hung the white sheets and mosquito netting across the parlor doorway. “The girls grew up in captivity,” Elzire’s cousin said. “If only the government had not shown up. The whole family would be happy today.”

  * * *

  —

  One morning before seven o’clock a cry from Émilie’s side of the room woke Yvonne.

  Émilie lay in her bed. Her face was pale, her eyes wide open. Yvonne touched Émilie’s arm. Stiff. The muscles were clenched, as though Émilie were exerting an extreme effort instead of lying in bed. Yvonne tried to slap her sister awake, calling her name. No response. Yvonne ran for Annette, Cécile, and Marie.

  “Our first instinct was that we should treat Émilie ourselves,” the four remembered. “We thought we could nurse her as we had looked after dolls when we played doctor and nurse, which was one of our favorite games….But the color of her face and the ceaseless twitch of her muscles terrified us. We realiz
ed within seconds that the situation was beyond us.”

  It was a seizure—a sort of short circuit in Émilie’s brain that commanded all her muscles to contract tightly enough to make her back arch and her eyes roll back, so tightly she could hardly breathe. Her cheeks were turning blue.

  By the time the four girls fetched Oliva and Elzire, Émilie’s body was convulsing as her muscles tensed and relaxed in a rapid, violent rhythm. Pink-tinged foam bubbled from her mouth.

  “My god!” Elzire exclaimed when she saw her daughter. “The grand mal!”

  Rose-Marie ran to phone the doctor. Oliva shouted for a spoon. He pried open Émilie’s jaw and forced the handle between her teeth, for fear she might sever her tongue. Slowly, her tremors calmed. Within minutes Émilie was breathing heavily, as though asleep.

  Elzire gathered up the blankets that had fallen to the floor and tucked her daughter in. “Now, no one will know anything happened,” she said. “Leave her to rest.”

  It was epilepsy, Elzire explained as they all waited down in the kitchen for the doctor to arrive—an incurable neurological condition whose alarming symptoms carried a centuries-old stigma. “If anyone found out about this I would be so ashamed!” Elzire said. “A sickness like this hurts a family’s reputation. We’ve drawn enough attention already.” They were not to breathe a word of Émilie’s seizure to anyone, Oliva instructed. Not even to the priest, or the doctor himself. As long as they gave her room to move and kept her safe from choking during her convulsions, he said, there was nothing to fear.

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