The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  Émilie did not even have a proper goodbye. On the November day when Marie entered the convent, Émilie remained in Nicolet at the Institut. Elzire had refused to bring her to Quebec City. “It will be too emotional for you,” Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile remembered their mother telling Émilie. “You’ll get sick.” Among themselves, the sisters believed that Elzire’s real concern was not for Émilie’s health, but fear that her daughter would have a seizure in front of the reporters.

  Émilie’s grief preyed on Yvonne’s conscience, for Marie’s bravery had spurred Yvonne to seek a path of her own. That fall, Yvonne had not returned to the Institut Familial with Annette, Cécile, and Émilie. Instead, she went to Montreal, to study art at Collège Marguerite-Bourgeois. She had also enrolled in courses that would prepare her for nursing school—without her father’s knowledge. “It was a big shock,” she said of living apart from her sisters for the first time, “but I had to do it.” Though Yvonne consoled herself with the thought that she had not been the one to break up their “family” of five, leaving Émilie behind so quickly after Marie’s departure troubled Yvonne down to her soul.

  “Are you taking good care of her?” Yvonne asked Annette and Cécile as they approached the yellow stone convent in Quebec City where they had gathered to bid Marie goodbye.

  “It’s all right, Ivy,” Annette soothed. “We’re looking out for her.” Cécile had shouldered Yvonne’s protective role, bringing Émilie her supper every night, and even crawling under the locked stall door when Émilie had a seizure in the students’ bathroom. With a sympathetic look, Annette made Yvonne understand that it was all right to leave them. Do what you must, and we’ll take care of Émilie, Annette’s face said. Later, when you can, it will be your turn.

  With Elzire, Pauline, and Rose-Marie, they waited in the visitors’ parlor while Marie exchanged her gray coat and blue hat for the black cotton caped dress, white veil, and thick-soled shoes that would designate her as a postulant for the next six months. If, after her testing and self-examination, Marie met with the nuns’ approval, she would be promoted to novice. Another two years and she could profess herself as a permanent member of the order.

  When the black wooden grille rose to reveal Marie, now garbed as a postulant, Annette saw “a new serenity that had transfigured her sister’s face.” Smiles dissolved into tears as one by one the sisters whispered their goodbyes.

  * * *

  —

  In some ways, the convent was not so very different from the life Marie had known in the nursery. Walls and gates isolated her from the world. Once again, she was one of a group of identically dressed sisters. The sound of the bells dictated how she spent her time, just as the ringing of chimes had signaled when to rise, eat, and sleep throughout early childhood.

  In other ways, though, living among the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament was more restrictive than life in the Big House. The nuns slept under rough sheets on straw mattresses laid over planks, and spoke to one another only during two thirty-minute periods each day. All their personal property was surrendered to the church. Marie did not have a room to call her own. The dormitory was composed of tiny cubicles separated by cotton curtains. Sentimental attachments, even to a particular cubicle, were to be avoided, compelling the postulants to switch cubicles regularly. Heads were to be lowered, hands concealed. Marie could not look through a window at the sky without permission. Like all postulants, she kept a notebook listing each and every one of her weaknesses, down to “the slightest hesitation in obeying the calls of the bells.” Though her immediate family alone numbered fourteen, Marie was permitted to write just two letters a month.

  “It was very severe,” Cécile reflected, “too severe for Marie. Given Marie’s emotional nature, it was too hard for her.”

  “She was too young to choose that way,” Annette agreed.

  Practicing poverty, chastity, and obedience came easily for Marie, but detachment from the world and her loved ones “hurt her as if she were cutting into her own flesh.” Separation from her sisters caused a pain she could subdue only with “superhuman effort,” and every letter she received from Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, or Émilie reawakened it. Her little notebook revealed that thoughts of the sky and the grass, the songs of birds, and the scents of flowers interrupted her devotions. Nevertheless, Marie remained committed to her vocation. “It touched the other sisters to see how hard Marie tried to do her duties,” the Mother Superior wrote, all the while suspecting that Marie was “a little too delicate to endure the vigorous requirements of the order.”

  * * *

  —

  While Marie struggled to find the inner silence that would bring her peace, Émilie embarked on her own path of faith. She, too, had long felt a yearning to offer her life to the service of God. “As time slipped by, she had grown less and less communicative, more and more engrossed with an internal life of her own,” her sisters remembered. “She was a soul apart,” they said, “who cared nothing whatever for clothes or make-up or money, while we at least liked to talk about such things.” Romance and marriage did not intrigue Émilie, either, even in the fairy-tale sense the others enjoyed contemplating. (None of them had been encouraged to marry, but Émilie may have felt herself especially excluded due to the stigma of her epilepsy.)

  For Émilie, stepping away from the outside world meant releasing herself of her past. In a convent, she hoped, she could find it in herself to forgive the harm she had suffered. Yet Émilie knew she could not renounce the world entirely, as Marie had. “I prefer to remain a child in the woods and unattached,” Émilie had written as a schoolgirl. “Nature means so much to me.”

  Émilie set her sights on L’Hospice de L’Accueil Gai—the Warm Welcome Hospice—in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, Quebec, a pious society of seven Oblate nuns who cared for aged priests in a rest home nestled in the Laurentian Mountains. As an Oblate Sister of Mary Immaculate, Émilie would not be required to wear a habit, take perpetual vows, or permanently wall herself off from her sisters as Marie had done. L’Accueil Gai welcomed, but did not demand, a lifetime commitment to God’s service. Each year, Émilie would have the opportunity to renew her vows, or choose to move on. It seemed the best of both worlds.

  Only Émilie’s physical condition stood in the way. The second-smallest of the five sisters at birth, Émilie had always been considered somewhat delicate, and the convent required “robust health” of its members. Her epilepsy also remained a closely guarded secret. But Émilie would not be thwarted. Shortly after watching her beloved Marie be promoted to novice in late May of 1954, Émilie set off for Sainte-Agathe, telling her parents she intended to spend several weeks at the hospice to build up her strength and contemplate whether L’Accueil Gai was where she belonged.

  Émilie “took to it heartily,” the Mother Superior noted. The twenty-year-old was not there to convalesce, but to begin a new life. Though “so quiet we could not tell whether she was happy or not,” no one could deny Émilie’s willingness to be of use. “She wanted to work, to do too much,” one of the residents said. She could hardly bring herself to follow the Oblates’ wishes that she rest. “She wanted to help people.”

  * * *

  —

  Less than two months after receiving the white tunic and scapular of a novice, Marie—now Sister Marie-Rachel—found herself exhausted by the rigors of cloistered life. Her appetite was suffering. Loneliness refused to loosen its grip on her. “I decided the only intelligent thing I could do was to come home,” Marie said.

  What she wanted most of all was Émilie. Father Parent, the founder of L’Accueil Gai, fetched Marie from Quebec City and brought her to his Oblate convent in Richelieu, just across the river from Montreal. Then he arranged for Émilie to catch a bus to Richelieu so that she could comfort her sister. Someone would be waiting at the Richelieu station to meet her, the priest assured Émilie.

  When the bus stopp
ed, Émilie rushed off, anxious to get to Marie as quickly as possible. No one greeted her. The crowed dwindled, and Émilie decided that rather than wait, she would ask directions and walk to the convent. No one knew where it was. Many had never heard of it. Finally, Émilie realized her mistake—“I was very confused, and I got out too soon—in Montreal, not Richelieu.” As Émilie walked up and down the streets, unable to retrace her steps to the bus station, the crowds and the noise and the traffic overwhelmed her. She had no money, no identification, and her bus ticket had vanished. Fatigue and shame at her ignorance brought Émilie to the verge of tears as night fell and the neon signs began to blare their brightly colored messages at her.

  According to the Montreal police, this was when Émilie approached a traffic constable, identified herself, and asked for directions. She “appeared dazed and ill,” so the police drove her to the chancery of Cardinal Léger, Archbishop of Montreal, whose secretary escorted Émilie back to the bus station the next morning and ensured that she boarded the correct bus to Richelieu.

  Émilie remembered the encounter entirely differently—she was walking down Pine Street in a daze when a patrol car stopped to see if she was all right. Émilie knew what kind of feeding frenzy the press would have if word got out that a Dionne Quintuplet had been found wandering the city, so she resisted revealing who she was or where she lived. The officers took Émilie to Station 10 to question her further, keeping her there overnight before delivering her to the archbishop.

  “They thought I was stupid,” Émilie told Cécile the next day. “I made them promise first that they would not let anyone know if I told them I was a Quintuplet, but they broke their promise. They were not polite.”

  One of the policemen leaked the story. Just as Émilie had feared, “all kinds of rumors” were in the Montreal papers the next morning. Among them was the report that reached Oliva Dionne before Émilie could contact her father herself: Émilie Dionne had been picked up by police and spent the night in prison. Oliva was furious—even more so when Émilie refused to return to Corbeil with Marie to join their sisters for the remainder of the summer.

  “I do not intend to go back home,” Émilie told Oliva. “I am going into the convent, and I shall spend the rest of my life there.”

  Émilie did exactly that.

  Less than three weeks after Émilie returned to L’Accueil Gai, on the afternoon of August 6, the telephone rang at the Big House. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie were finishing lunch with Oliva Jr. and Victor, dousing bowls of fresh blueberries with cream and sprinkling them with sugar, when their mother came into the room. For a moment Elzire stood without speaking. Oliva Jr. got up and turned off the radio. The look on Elzire’s face was all the warning Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie had.

  “Take hold of yourselves,” their mother said. “The nuns telephoned. Émilie has died.”

  * * *

  —

  The news reports at first were garbled. QUINT DIES OF STROKE, said the Toronto Globe’s front-page headline. Heart disease, said the Toronto Star. There was speculation that a childhood attack of polio had played a role. Émilie’s epilepsy had been so carefully guarded that even Mort Fellman, editor of the North Bay Nugget and one of Oliva Dionne’s few friends, had no idea it was at the root of Émilie’s death.

  Around four o’clock the afternoon before, the Sainte-Agathe postmaster noticed the residents of L’Accueil Gai heading toward the edge of the woods for a picnic. “They were all talking and laughing,” he said. “I noticed Émilie when she left and when she returned with them. She seemed to be enjoying herself.” Émilie was so adept at hiding her condition, the postmaster could not have guessed that a seizure had struck her during the excursion. There had been another earlier that day, in the kitchen, that left her with a bruised ankle. Expecting more attacks, Émilie asked one of the Oblates to sleep in her little gray-walled cell—to keep an eye on her. Three more seizures came during the night. In the morning Émilie told the others she still felt unwell and wanted no breakfast. She was sent back to bed while the rest of the Oblates went to Mass as always. “I looked in on her before we went, and she was sleeping peacefully,” one of them said afterward. “I thought she was all right.” The Oblates did not understand the true nature of Émilie’s condition, apparently attributing her “frequent weak spells” to feebleness in her legs and heart.

  Sometime between 9:15 and 10:00 that morning, yet another seizure struck. This time the spasms caused Émilie to vomit. No one was there to reposition her or clear her airway. Unable to breathe, Émilie suffocated.

  Mother Superior Anne-Marie Tardif told the papers, “We had no idea she was so ill. When we did realize it, there wasn’t time to get the doctor.”

  Émilie was twenty years old.

  * * *

  —

  “Cécile, you will never feel so bad again in your whole life,” Cécile told herself as she watched the hearse approach the Big House late the following night. Losing Émilie made Cécile and her sisters feel “like widows and orphans at the same time.” The pain was not only in their hearts and minds, but in their flesh. Once, for a brief flicker of time before they were born, they had all been one. One single being. Though they were no longer joined, that physical bond still lingered deep within their separate bodies. The very fact that the rest of their hearts could continue to beat without Émilie’s was more than Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie could comprehend. “It was like a nightmare,” Cécile said later. “Because knowing that the birth was a miracle, as people said, I thought we would never die.”

  For Yvonne, the sensation was as though a light had gone out inside her—“a flame that would never again be revived.” If she had been there, watching over Émilie as she had always done, Yvonne knew her sister would still be alive.

  When Annette found no comfort in the prayers she had been taught to recite, her grief flared into rebellion toward God for stealing Émilie away.

  Guilt weighted Cécile’s grief. “Inside, there’s a voice that said, ‘You should have done this or that,’ ” as though one tiny change might have prevented her sister’s death. That voice would echo in Cécile’s mind for years to come.

  Marie made a double-layered cocoon of her pain, sealing herself off from both her own grief and those around her. All she allowed to exist inside her was a scream, reverberating between the shells she had built within and around herself. Marie was certain she belonged in the casket instead of Émilie—or at least laid out beside her mirror twin.

  * * *

  —

  Their legs trembled as they descended the stairs to see Émilie’s body. Marie held Yvonne’s arm to keep from fainting. Annette clasped her own hands while Cécile bit her lips; both feared their emotions would break loose if they did not keep tight hold of themselves.

  Émilie’s gray steel casket filled the big bay window of the living room. She had been laid out in a powder-blue voile dress with a white lace collar. A white rosary twined between her fingers. Trucks of flowers arrived every hour, until the arrangements banked around the casket touched the ceiling. Thousands of sympathy cards accumulated across the floor in stacks of fifty.

  Together the four sisters took their turns touching Émilie’s cheek, holding her hands, kissing her forehead, and speaking silently to her. They sat next to her casket until the wee hours of the morning, then tried to sleep. It was no use. Before dawn, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie were at Émilie’s side once more.

  Only the arrival of photographer Arthur Sasse “broke the spell” the sisters had cast over themselves that morning. He had come to capture the final picture of the Dionne Quintuplets together—Émilie in her casket, with Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie gazing down at her face one last time. Cécile balked. But Mr. Sasse reminded them they were still under contract for newspaper photographs. “Just one, then,” Cécile said.

  “Émilie i
s still playing the part of a quintuplet for the camera,” Yvonne thought as they dutifully posed, “even though she’s dead.”

  When Mr. Sasse had finished, the four sisters retreated upstairs. For the first time in eleven years, Oliva Dionne was unlocking the gate and opening the doors to the Big House, welcoming “persons genuine in their grief” into his home to view his daughter’s body. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie wanted no part of this last quintuplet show.

  Five thousand people filed past Émilie’s casket that day, admitted in groups of twenty, every one of them quiet and orderly. Outside, the line stretched a third of a mile in spite of a light rain. Six police constables managed the traffic as cars from as far away as California, Florida, and British Columbia came up the Corbeil road.

  Inside, Oliva stood beside the bier, accepting handshakes and words of comfort from the mourners. “The way everyone has been so kind to us is more than we can express,” Oliva said. “We are very, very grateful.” Elzire sat near the doors to the verandah. Now and then a pang of emotion twisted her face as she silently received whispered condolences, but her eyes remained dry. “She is stronger than I am at a time like this,” Oliva said of his wife. “We have come through a lot during the past twenty years and she has always been wonderful.”

  * * *

  —

  Elzire’s grief spilled free at the funeral service the next day. As reporters looked on and movie cameras whirred in the balcony above, the shy farmwife who had spent two decades spurning the limelight wept openly through the solemn requiem.

  Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie hardly noticed the onlookers. “It was very dark in the church,” Cécile recalled. “I found it awful. I didn’t see them at the time but after it I saw pictures and I knew there was a lot of people.” The four of them sat in two tight pairs: Yvonne and Marie, Annette and Cécile. They craved one another’s touch, so that they might cling to the conviction “that they were still part of a single living body, to believe that Émilie would always be with them, not in a coffin at the foot of the altar.” Even to strangers, Marie was the most visibly stricken. She alone of her sisters cried throughout the Mass, her sobs taking control of her when the priest sprinkled Émilie’s casket with holy water. The sight of the black-draped casket passing down the aisle at the close of the service affected Marie so profoundly that her mother and sister Rose-Marie supported her as she left the church.