The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  The affection was mutual. To most young children, da-da means daddy, but to the five little girls who lived in the Dafoe Hospital, da-da was doctor. “They know his car when it comes & flock to the window screeching when it appears,” wrote Nurse Leroux. “They love having his visits.”

  “I remember Dr. Dafoe as a good man, wanting to save us and protect us,” Annette said. “And I always disagreed when I heard people speaking against him. I never liked that.”

  Whatever his true feelings about his worldwide fame, Dafoe had little choice but to project an image of nonchalance. His job and his position on the board of guardians depended on it. If anyone suspected he was acting in his own best interests instead of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s, the new life he had become accustomed to would evaporate in a heartbeat.

  The Dionne Quintuplets were irresistible. To fans, to tourists, to advertisers—and to science. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie represented an unprecedented opportunity that doctors, geneticists, and child psychologists had only dreamed of: the chance to guide and study the development of five apparently identical children in a completely controlled environment.

  “One of the supreme satisfactions I have found in my association with the case of the Dionne quintuplets is something which every physician will understand,” Dr. Dafoe wrote. “All his life he will have seen little children weakened and warped because he could not tell their mothers what to do, or the mothers, if told, would not obey.” Prescribing the best care and watching dutiful nurses carry it out to the letter was something Dafoe deemed “worth any amount of personal sacrifice.”

  There could be no better circumstances to put the most up-to-date child-rearing methods to the test. “If ever the question, ‘How to raise a child to be a genius,’ is to be answered, it will be done by the Dionne Quintuplets,” a journalist confidently predicted. Or as one expert put it, “If, at the end of eighteen years, we can’t inculcate in these children integrity, good judgement and a sense of values, what good is education?”

  The scientists had to tread lightly, though. Neither the fans nor the guardians would tolerate the idea of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie being experimented upon. “They should never become ‘guinea pigs’ of science,” Dr. Dafoe assured the public. However, he also believed it was possible to study the children safely, so long as it was done “with appropriate dignity and efficiency.”

  Dr. Blatz was the obvious choice to head the research. His team’s first step was to determine whether the children were truly identical. Anyone looking at the five sisters in person or in photos was invariably dazzled by their exceptional similarity, but as yet there was no scientific proof that they were single-egg quintuplets. Without DNA technology, Blatz’s team had to rely on a battery of minute biological observations.

  “We were weighed, measured, tested, studied, and examined to the heart’s content of doctors and scientists,” the sisters remembered. “In the gentlest possible fashion, we were peered at, pricked and prodded for years.” The researchers mapped the shapes of their ears; the ridges on their fingertips, their palms, and the soles of their feet; the flecks of color in their irises; and the color and texture of their hair.

  Even without DNA tests, Blatz’s team concluded definitively that the five girls had indeed descended from a single egg cell. Any two of them—Annette and Marie, or Cécile and Yvonne, for example—were as similar as a set of identical twins. All had the same blood type. Their eye color, hair color, and skin tone were deemed “nearly indistinguishable.” The shapes formed by the crinkles and folds of their ears—a feature used for identification before the discovery of fingerprints—looked as though they had all been cast from the same mold.

  All five of their left handprints were remarkably similar, as were their right handprints. In fact, the resemblance was so great that the print of Émilie’s left hand, for example, was a closer match to her four sisters’ left handprints than to her own right handprint. (The opposite was true of their siblings. The print from Ernest’s left hand was more similar to that from his right hand than to any of his brothers’ or sisters’.)

  Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie shared more unusual characteristics, too. All five sisters’ eyelids folded in an uncommon way at the inner corners. The flesh between their second and third toes extended a quarter inch beyond the joint, an observation that spawned a rumor that the Dionnes were web-footed but in reality only gave those toes a slightly stubby look. And they all had whorls—spiral patterns—on the palms between their third and fourth fingers, a trait usually seen in only one or two of every two hundred people.

  Gauging the intensity of these similarities from one sister to the next eventually allowed the scientists to construct a theory of exactly when and how a single egg had divided itself into the makings of five children. Yvonne and Annette were most alike. They were also the largest, signaling that they were probably the first to separate. Émilie and Marie were mirror twins—reverse images of each other. (Émilie was left-handed, Marie right-handed. Marie’s hair whorl turned clockwise, Émilie’s counterclockwise.) Being the smallest, they were likely the last to separate. Cécile shared characteristics of both sets, making her a sort of bridge between the two pairs. Thus, the “blueprint” for the Dionne Quintuplets went like this: First, a single egg split into two masses of cells. Then one of those halves split again, forming Yvonne and Annette. The remaining half split twice—once to create Cécile, and then finally the last unnamed mass of cells divided itself into Émilie and Marie.

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  Satisfied that they had documented every possible physical similarity, Blatz’s team next set out to scrutinize the girls’ personalities. Month after month for two years the researchers traveled from Toronto to Callander to watch the sisters interact—first in pairs in playpens, then all together in the playroom.

  With clipboards in hand, Blatz’s team recorded “any physical or other contact between children, other than of a casual nature, which implies social awareness.” Pushing counted. Shoving back counted. Talking, laughing, and crying counted. Offering a sister a toy counted, as did stealing a toy. Getting attention counted as much as giving attention.

  For instance, if Cécile approached Annette and attempted to capture her attention “by gesture, touch, or word,” that counted as initiating contact. Any sort of reply, verbal or nonverbal, would be credited to Annette as a response. A single interaction quickly racked up multiple “points” for each child: if Annette snatched Yvonne’s hair ribbon, making Yvonne cry, and then gave it back, prompting Yvonne to stop crying, the researcher noted four social contacts: one initiation (grabbing) and one response (returning) by Annette, and two responses by Yvonne (crying and then stopping).

  After analyzing 1,367 contacts, the researchers determined that Annette was the most outgoing, because she initiated the most interactions. Yvonne was in a sense the most popular, but also the most passive. She did not have to bother with attracting attention because her sisters sought her out more often than anyone else. Cécile, “whose unpredictable behavior delights her sisters,” came in at second most popular. Émilie was something of a loner, the least likely to either seek out or respond to her sisters’ attention. Though Marie was very much interested in engaging with her sisters, she attracted the least amount of attention—largely because she was usually the last to learn a new game or skill, making her less interesting to the other four.

  What did it all mean? According to Blatz, these differences proved that the girls’ individual personalities were already unique. Yvonne, he said, was the matriarch of the group. Little Marie fit the role of the baby, always tagging along behind her bigger, faster sisters. Annette was labeled aggressive, though not in the sense that she was quarrelsome. (“Annette seeks an audience” was how he put it.) Émilie won the title of “happy-go-lucky,” for her willingness “to give and tak
e on a fifty-fifty basis.” Cécile apparently stumped Blatz’s team, her behavior defying a simple label. They dubbed her “the unknown quantity.”

  “One thing is certain and that is, that these children do not fit into a similar mould of personality development,” Blatz wrote. Their five personalities, he believed, were not innate, but sprang from the children’s individual responses to the “social environment.”

  Quint fans reveled in this information. A series of newspaper stories spread Blatz’s conclusions across the continent. Life magazine published a six-page article, complete with charts and over three dozen photographs. Yet some more critical readers, like twin expert Horatio Newman, dismissed Blatz’s conclusions as “artificial.”

  According to Newman, the researchers had come up with these “personalities” only after hours of hovering over the children with charts and clipboards, noting infinitesimal differences between them. “Anyone watching them play together would be at a loss to pick out the ‘matriarch’ from the ‘baby’ or the ‘aggressive member’ from the ‘happy-go-lucky’ one,” Newman argued, and a writer for Better Homes and Gardens confirmed his theory.

  “I was sure I would be able to spot Yvonne and Annette by their leadership, Émilie by her independence, Marie because she is the littlest,” the magazine’s child care and training director boasted after attending the conference where Dr. Blatz presented his results. But seeing the children in person the very next day confounded her. “Tell them apart? Just try it yourself sometime!” she exclaimed. “The one who played so long in the sandpile by herself proved to be Yvonne, not Émilie, and Marie turned out to be Cécile.”

  The setup for such studies, Newman pointed out, “is about as poor as it could possibly be made.” How were the researchers supposed to find authentic differences in five identical children living in an identical environment? “Indeed, a wider variety of experience seems to be exactly what they need and should have from now on.”

  Little proved Newman’s point better than their language skills—or rather, their lack of language skills. At nearly two, they did not say mama or papa. Instead, they called both of their parents “Ah.” At age three, when most toddlers know 200 to 450 words, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s vocabulary hovered around 75. The unofficial language of the nursery was “Quintalk,” a French baby talk understood only by their nurses. Blatz and his researchers had no choice but to note the “apparent retardation” of the girls’ language skills.

  “It’s the most natural thing in the world that the quints don’t talk more,” Dr. Blatz assured the public. “Language is a tool used when needed. The Quints haven’t needed this tool.” The sisters never left the nursery grounds. Everything was familiar, giving them no reason to ask “What’s that?” all day long like other youngsters. Their routine was so predictable and their nurses knew them so well that they rarely needed to ask for anything at all before it was handed to them.

  Still, the report quickly gave rise to the notion that the Dionnes were “backward.” The results of their mental tests didn’t help dispel that impression.

  “The quintuplets already provide perhaps the clearest test we have ever had of our modern educational skills and theories,” said the New York Times, yet according to the data Blatz’s team gathered, those skills and theories were doing nothing to boost the sisters’ mental growth. Yvonne, rated the brightest of the five, was behind on nearly every score—by some measures, almost a year behind.

  Blatz’s routine and disciplinary methods weren’t producing extraordinary results, either. The girls were, in fact, as trying and as difficult to control as any other toddlers. They sucked their thumbs, fought, and sometimes bit one another. They delighted in banging their wooden building blocks against the nursery windows until the glass shattered.

  When it was time to be bathed or dressed, the five sisters mobbed the washroom door, erupting into a frenzy as they all vied to be first. They were still being spoon-fed at age two, and hated every minute of it. After a few bites the toddlers darted out of reach, flung their food across the nursery, and threw tantrums.

  More tantrums came at playtime. The nurses had been so attentive for so long—literally doing everything for them since the day they were born—that the little girls did not even know how to use their toys without help. If an adult did not sit down and amuse them, they quickly screamed with boredom or frustration.

  At bedtime they could be so unruly and reluctant to lie down that getting the five of them to stay under the covers was “in actual fact…the equivalent of tucking seventy-one children into bed.” To top it off, toilet training was not progressing by the usual timetable, in part because the girls had discovered that demanding a diaper change was a foolproof method of winning a few coveted minutes of individual attention.

  By the standards of the day, discipline was lax. Dr. Blatz believed that obedience should not grow out of fear, nagging, or dread of punishment. He advocated teaching children that every behavior has consequences—some pleasant and some unpleasant—and leaving it up to the child to choose. So there were no threats, spankings, or angry reprimands for the Dionnes. Instead, “the machinery of their pleasantly ordered lives stops when they don’t obey.” The only punishment for stubborn or unruly episodes of “non-compliance” was a time-out in a small sunny room with a table and chair and a few playthings. It was officially known as the isolation room, but the press preferred to call it “Dionne jail.”

  “It was in no sense uncomfortable,” the sisters remembered, “but the four who were left behind when the offender had been marched off always felt that they were suffering as much as the prisoner. Punishment for one was punishment for all.”

  Blatz’s techniques succeeded in halting the washroom stampedes and the mealtime woes. The graphs and tables that charted “emotional episodes” and “non-compliance behavior” proved that the girls were beginning to master self-control—as most children do as they approach age three. Even so, any one of them could rack up at least a dozen noncompliance episodes in a single day. And when Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie took it into their heads to misbehave as a group, they were almost impossible to dissuade. The only way to keep them all in bed was to pin the legs of their pajamas together. Nothing, not even shatterproof glass, could compel them to stop banging the windows to smithereens.

  Dr. Blatz’s dominion over the nursery meant that Oliva and Elzire had virtually no say in how their daughters were fed, educated, disciplined, or even toilet trained. Though the staff theoretically sympathized, it was not a situation they showed much willingness to change. “When [Mrs. Dionne] came over,” one of Blatz’s colleagues remembered, “the nurses had instructions to let her be in charge. Dr. Blatz told them to be sure to let her do things for the quints—to feel that she was their mother. But the nurses had difficulty letting her do it.”

  Oliva and Elzire’s resentment and frustration were so palpable, it made their visits unpleasant for everyone. “The mother and father felt that the doctor was stealing the children’s love, and vice versa,” Nurse Mollie O’Shaughnessy reflected. That sense of rivalry between the Dionnes and the staff grew until they regarded each other as opponents. As Oliva and Elzire snatched desperately at any illusion of control, the two sides found themselves engaged in an ongoing series of spats.

  Oliva tended to direct his ire at Dr. Dafoe, challenging the hospital’s rules and procedures in ways that undermined the doctor’s authority. When Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie came down with head colds, Oliva told the press he was being kept in the dark about their true condition and demanded a second opinion. (The outside doctor confirmed Dafoe’s diagnosis.) On another occasion, when he was turned away at the gate because the children in the farmhouse were recovering from measles, Oliva defied the quarantine and crawled under the hospital fence through a drainpipe. (The guards permitted him to look through a window at his daughters, the
n sent him home.) He was not above making cutting remarks about his rival, either. “If they look like anybody, it must be Dr. Dafoe,” a bitter Oliva replied when a reporter remarked on the girls’ striking resemblance to Elzire.

  While Oliva tussled with the doctor, Elzire butted heads with the nurses—so much so that the girls came to remember their mother primarily as a source of distress. When Elzire was in the nursery, Cécile said, “there was always some dispute.” She interfered with the tricycle processions the nurses arranged for the tourists in the observation playground. Her temper could flare at the way the staff spoke to her children, spurring Elzire to give the offending nurse a shove or a slap while the girls watched. “You will listen to me, not to her,” she told her daughters when a nurse tried to discipline Yvonne. Accustomed to serving her elder children hearty meat soup, mashed potatoes and gravy, crusty brown bread, and all the milk they could drink, Elzire protested in the North Bay Nugget about the “greenish mush” (strained fruit blended with oatmeal) the nurses fed Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. Her little girls were restless from hunger, she said, and bruised easily. Her concerns appeared in newspapers across the continent.

  “The Dionne family,” Dr. Dafoe countered, “are accustomed to lumberjack meals.” Such hearty fare was more than the children’s digestive systems could handle, he claimed, adding that “the Dionne quintuplets are today the happiest and healthiest bunch of little crickets I have ever seen.” What Elzire termed restlessness was in Dafoe’s eyes “vitality and pep.” He shrugged off her accusation that Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie received only a third of a cup of milk at lunch, saying he was ordering at least five quarts a day to keep up with them. “That just shows how much the parents actually know about their own children,” the doctor remarked.