by Sarah Miller
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The press had been waiting outside the fence at the tiny Sacred Heart Cemetery for nearly two hours by the time the mourners arrived. Dressed in gray suits with gray gloves, Émilie’s four brothers and two brothers-in-law carried her casket to the edge of the freshly cut earth. Behind them came Oliva, “face haggard with grief,” holding tight to the hand of his youngest child, seven-year-old Claude. Elzire appeared to be “almost in a state of collapse.”
Over two dozen photographers and newsreel and TV cameramen assembled on the far side of the grave, facing the family. As they confronted the flashbulbs, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie felt entirely detached from the ceremony; it might as well have been happening to someone else. The four of them clustered together, white-faced and sobbing “bitterly” as the priest intoned the committal service. To Cécile, standing in the cemetery was “senseless”; she did not want to bury her sister, but “to keep Émilie alive within her soul.” Once again the bluntness of Marie’s pain singled her out from her sisters; the depth of her shock was so visible on her face, she looked as though she were in a trance.
As the Dionne family filed away at the end of the graveside rites, the spectators, many of them American, breached the police guard at the cemetery gate. “We are not lowering the body until every last one of you leaves,” Father LaFrance informed them. It was the custom in the district to wait until the cemetery was empty before lowering the casket.
One of Émilie’s schoolmates plucked a red rose from an arrangement on the casket before turning to go. Three more followed suit. Then strangers began stepping forward to claim blossoms. “Have you no respect for the dead?” Father LaFrance asked them. His rebuke shamed the souvenir hunters into leaving, but there was nothing to keep them from returning to Émilie’s grave after the burial was complete. At ten-thirty that evening, they were still coming. The flowers lasted an hour, Leo Voyer of Callander remembered. “All gone. And the grass—they even picked up the grass around the grave.”
The cage is open and the birds are flying away, Annette thought as she watched the farmhouse, the nursery, and the observatory disappear from view. The last thing Émilie had done was show her sisters that it was possible to disobey, to follow their own desires. Now that she was gone, they adopted her courage as their own. Just as Émilie had insisted on returning to Sainte-Agathe, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie defied their parents’ wishes and set out for a new life in Montreal that autumn of 1954. Yvonne and Cécile would study nursing. Annette intended to take up music, and Marie would try turning her attention to literature.
Beneath the ever-present weight of their grief, there was a strange new lightness. “I remember feeling that it was a sort of release, being that one was dead,” Cécile confessed. “For all of us.”
If only being a quint was a secret one carried inside oneself, Yvonne had wished only the month before when people stopped to stare at her. Now that there were just four living Dionne sisters, that wish had begun to materialize. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s private bond remained indelible. Yet in the public’s eyes, the set had been irreparably broken. Émilie’s death scattered the magic that made the Dionne Quintuplets irresistible to the public.
“I knew it was better like that,” Cécile said. “Although it was very painful. I think it was the start of finding our individuality.”
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Yvonne and Cécile entered Hôpital Notre-Dame de l’Espérance as student nurses and shared a room in the nurses’ quarters. The smells of antiseptics and anesthetics, so uninviting to others, became to them the scent of freedom. “I like everything about nursing,” Yvonne said; “taking care of people, getting them to bed, working on case histories.” For the first time in their lives, they were encouraged to wear makeup—“a touch of lipstick to brighten up the patients’ spirits.” No milestone was too tiny to revel in.
Marie and Annette enrolled at Collège Marguerite-Bourgeois, taking rooms next to each other. Their studies were not driven by the same focus and ambition that Yvonne and Cécile enjoyed. Without a clear vision for the years ahead, the two of them were a little bit at sea—Marie more than Annette. “An inexplicable weariness and undefined anxiety formed a screen between her and the world, preventing her from enjoying her new life,” her sisters noticed. Annette was hesitant about engaging with the world, too. “I think she wants to be friendly but she’s afraid,” a nun at the college reckoned. In the back of her mind, Annette always wondered who was truly interested in getting to know her—Annette Dionne—and who sought out her company solely for the prestige of befriending a Dionne Quintuplet.
Living separately, even “two by two,” was difficult to tolerate. As little as a day or two apart rarely failed to trigger a fundamental loneliness in either pair of sisters. “The feeling is as deep as thirst or hunger,” they tried to explain, “but it is difficult to put into words. Possibly a bird experiences the same sensation before it migrates, or an animal when it sniffs water in the distance somewhere. Each of us has it, though not in exactly the same degree at the same time. It is a kind of pull, an attraction that obliterates distance or immediate circumstances.” The need to be together was so strong, taxi fares between the college and the hospital ate up most of their pocket money and forced the sisters to scrimp on other expenses.
There were practical challenges as well. Everyday tasks that any other young woman would navigate without a second thought baffled and intimidated the Dionne sisters. “Nobody had thought fit to show us how to walk into a store, go up to the counter, and exercise a modicum of judgment by choosing a dress,” the four sisters reflected. They did not know what sizes they wore, and if not for the dollar sign on the tag, might not have known how to tell the price from the size in the first place. The same went for buying groceries or cooking a meal. As children they’d had an elaborate play set complete with shelves of real food, a scale, shopping bags, and a cash register, but never in their lives had they set foot in an actual grocery store.
The problem ran deeper than simple ignorance. “We had been raised without a shred of independence or mental muscle,” Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie realized, echoing the very concerns Dr. Alfred Adler had voiced while they were still toddlers. “We were introverts through and through, imbued with the conviction that we were not capable of making up our own minds about anything or of doing anything without seeking somebody’s permission.”
Meeting and befriending young men “represented a riddle that left the mind reeling.”
Cécile became the first to risk making a date, almost by accident. All she did was return a telephone message with a number she did not recognize. A man’s voice answered—Philippe Langlois, a CBC technician who had been intrigued by her face at a Montreal Symphony Orchestra concert, then recognized her picture in an article about Cécile and her sisters. The paper said they were “sequestered” in Montreal.
“That is absolutely false,” Cécile told him a little hotly. They could come and go as they pleased, just like any other students.
“Oh,” Philippe said. “And I had hoped to come to your rescue, even though I don’t have a white horse or a suit of armor.” Cécile laughed in spite of herself, and Philippe invited her out for a cup of coffee.
She agreed, largely to prove to herself that she could do such a thing, and regretted her decision the instant she hung up the phone. But Philippe Langlois turned out to be tall and thin, with “sparkling eyes and an attractive smile.” He shook Cécile’s hand and presented her with a red carnation, charming her with his gentle manners and easygoing confidence.
For their first date she wore a black coat, two sizes too big, that reached her ankles. Yet Philippe did not hesitate to ask Cécile for a second date. “The first few times I met her,” Philippe remembered, “I sensed that in her childhood she must have missed love. It was revealed in many
ways—although I can’t explain exactly how. But I knew.” Movies, walks through the city, concerts, and plays followed that first cup of coffee, excursions that allowed Cécile to experience life in a way she never had before.
“From the smile on her face and the happiness in her eyes,” her sisters said, “we judged it was good for her and wondered if the same, inexplicable thing might happen to another of us one day.”
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The Dionnes’ next suitor came by way of a case of appendicitis. When Germain Allard—Gerry to his friends—came to visit his brother in Hôpital Notre-Dame de l’Espérance, Cécile recognized an opportunity to play Cupid for Annette. Annette and Gerry had been exchanging occasional letters for years, but the two had never met. Gerry’s sister had attended Villa Notre Dame, and had read his playful letters aloud so Annette could enjoy his sense of humor, too. One day Annette told Gerry’s sister to write, “Annette says good-bye,” at the end of one of her replies.
“So in my next letter I put down, ‘Good-bye, Annette!’ ” Gerry remembered. “That’s how it all started.”
When Cécile realized who he was, she told Gerry he ought to get to know Annette in person. He agreed. Ten days later, a “spic and span” Gerry arrived at the college. Cécile had not told Annette a thing. All she said to her sister was “Someone is expecting you.”
That was how Annette, who was shy enough to burst into tears and flee if a reporter approached asking questions, found herself face to face with a young man she had never laid eyes on. She stood stranded in the doorway as Cécile introduced them, unwilling to enter the room.
“Finally Cécile walked out,” Gerry recalled, “and there we were, just the two of us.” The memory made him smile. “Are you afraid to be alone with me?” he asked Annette.
“What do you want me to answer?” Annette replied, furious with her sister for setting such a trap and luring her into it.
Gerry asked if she would like to sit down.
“No, thank you,” she snapped. Her dress was an old one with a split in the seam. She could not sit down even if she’d wanted to. But to Annette’s surprise, Gerry’s frankness disarmed her. He understood what she might be feeling and wasn’t afraid to express it. Annette decided she was willing to meet him again.
The attraction was mutual. “I fell in love with those eloquent greenish-brown eyes, and those high Audrey Hepburn cheekbones, and the sweetest smile I had ever seen on a gentle girl’s face,” Gerry said. He was not as confident as Annette believed, though. “She was a famous celebrity, and me, I was a simple guy—and a poor one. It wasn’t possible for her to be interested in me for too long.”
Annette was just as unsure of herself. “I thought I wasn’t able to love,” she confessed later. Her emotionally sterile childhood, she secretly believed, had stunted her capacity to bond with others. Didn’t her lack of affection toward her parents and other siblings prove that? “I thought my life had harmed me in some way,” she recalled. But as Gerry gradually introduced her to the everyday joys of the world, teaching her to appreciate everything from philosophy and poetry to hockey games, Annette realized she had been mistaken. She had all the same feelings as anyone—the only thing she’d lacked was an opportunity to share them with someone whose affection was unsullied by decades of pain and resentment. “Being in love with him,” Annette said, “was like being reborn.”
On May 28, 1955, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie turned twenty-one. That day everyone in the world wanted to know how the four sisters planned to spend the money that had been piling up in their trust fund for two decades. Only Yvonne consented to speak to the press.
“I don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “I’m not interested in it right now. First I want to finish my course, and that will be two more years.” Maybe she would travel, she said. “There are many places I should like to see, but not now.”
Such indifference bordered on offensive. In the midst of the Great Depression, quint fans had distracted themselves from their own financial woes with happy daydreams of the luxuries those five beautiful babies could one day buy with the millions of dollars they had seemed to earn effortlessly. But the girls themselves had never entertained such fantasies about their future fortune. They couldn’t—no one had told them it existed.
The first they heard about a quint account was from a newspaper article not long after Émilie died. Her $171,000 share of the quintuplet fortune was to be split fourteen ways, the article said—among Oliva, Elzire, and their twelve surviving children. In addition to a $12,000 share of Émilie’s estate, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie realized, each of them was scheduled to inherit $171,000 within a matter of months, just as Émilie would have. The four of them were dumbfounded. Everyone in the world knew the Dionne Quintuplets would one day be rich—everyone but the sisters themselves. Émilie had died unaware. No wonder the principal at the Institut Familial had told them they could buy the whole school if they wanted to.
The arithmetic was staggering: $183,000—equivalent to $1,306,498 US in 2017—seemed an enormous figure to the four sisters, accustomed as they were to allowances of $5 each month. Yet they did not have enough experience with money to know whether that was enough to buy a bicycle, a car, or a fur coat. “I didn’t know a nickel from a quarter until I left home for the first time at age eighteen,” Annette said.
Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie were indeed rich, just as the government of Ontario had promised. However, it wasn’t as though they were handed keys to four vaults full of money and invited to help themselves. Instead, an elaborate payout system had been structured to ensure that their fortune would last for decades to come.
The trust consisted of two kinds of money: principal and interest. The principal was what nearly everyone imagined when they thought of the quintuplet bank account: the thousands upon thousands of dollars in royalties collected from advertisers, photographers, and filmmakers during the heyday of Quint-mania. That principal had been invested in real estate, government bonds, and stocks, and would remain invested so it could generate income. That income was the interest.
For the first ten years, the Dionne sisters could not remove any of the principal from their accounts. They would receive only interest, in payments of $500 a month (about $3,550 in US currency today). The sisters would have three opportunities to withdraw lump sums from the principal, though their monthly payments would shrink accordingly every time they did. At age thirty-one, they were entitled to 15 percent. At thirty-nine, they could take 25 percent of the remaining balance. Finally, at forty-five, they could take half of what was left—provided that each sister’s account never dropped below $30,000. That amount was permanently reserved for their heirs.
The trust arrangement also specified that Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie would cover the expense of maintaining the Big House. Though the sisters technically owned it, Oliva and Elzire were granted the right to “enjoy and occupy” the mansion to the end of their days. When their parents ran short of funds, the girls agreed to deduct $75 apiece from their monthly allowances to funnel an additional $300 to their mother and father.
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Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie remembered that first summer and fall of their adulthood as “a time of profound stirring, of self-searching, of adjustment.” For the first time, they had total charge of their own lives, yet their circumstances made it difficult to revel in this new independence. Cécile and Yvonne were swamped with studies and hospital duties. Annette remained rudderless, craving direction. Music, her “special delight,” was not the career she wanted after all. Nursing appealed to her, but on a visit home Elzire told Annette it was “out of the question.” The thought of yet another of her daughters joining the ranks of the profession that had sliced her family in half was more than Elzire was willing to stomach without a fight. Annette, who had always striven to please
her mother, did not have the heart to oppose Elzire now. She reapplied to the Institut Familial, where she began to explore teaching and psychology.
Marie gave them all cause for concern. “Something had changed,” Cécile noticed. “Marie was very discouraged; she seemed disconnected. She had no expression on her face.” She attempted to reenter Les Servantes du Très Saint Sacrement and failed. Her delicate health simply would not adapt to such a solitary, rigorous life. After two months at the convent, she was suffering from recurring chest pains and anemia. Annette and Gerry collected Marie from Quebec City and brought her to Montreal so she could recuperate under Yvonne and Cécile’s watch in Hôpital Notre-Dame de l’Espérance.
When Marie was discharged in December, she and Annette rented a two-bedroom apartment in Montreal. It became “a kind of sanctuary” for all four sisters, the first place they could truly call home.
“We hoped to spend the holiday together in our delightful new hideaway, quietly and peacefully and restfully, doing very little but enjoying the chance to see one another without interruption for a day or so.” The four of them signed a Christmas card for their parents and put it in the mail on December 22. They would go to Corbeil for New Year’s—the traditional holiday for family reunions and gift-giving among French Canadian families.