The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

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  Two days after Christmas, Phyllis Griffiths of the Toronto Telegram cornered Yvonne in the hospital and demanded to know why she and her sisters hadn’t sent their parents a Christmas card. Yvonne was taken aback. She had not seen the morning’s headlines. PAPA DIONNE DECLARES QUINTS IGNORED FAMILY AT CHRISTMAS, said the front page of the Toronto Star. Oliva Dionne had called Mort Fellman at the North Bay Nugget that morning and revealed that Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie had been absent from the family’s festivities. The story “put the name Dionne back in more and bigger print than at any time since the birth of the famous quintuplets.”

  Tears streamed down Yvonne’s face as the reporter read her father’s statement:

  “We were not surprised when the Quints did not come home for Christmas,” Oliva had told the press. He and Elzire had sensed a widening separation for months, a separation they both blamed on “outside intruders.” He would not identify these outsiders, however, not under any circumstances. “The Quints know who they are, and we know who they are, but that’s all I’m going to say about them,” he added cryptically. (Yvonne did indeed know. The “intruders” could only be Gerry and Philippe. Oliva had been keeping tabs on his daughters even from a distance—the bills for the private detectives showed up on their trust fund accounts.) “We didn’t even receive a card from them,” Oliva said.

  “We did send one,” Yvonne protested to Ms. Griffiths. “Can we help it if they didn’t get it?”

  The article went on as though Oliva were right there, arguing with his daughter. All the other Dionne children had at least telephoned to wish their parents a merry Christmas, he pointed out. Money, Oliva claimed, was at the root of the breach. “We suspected that outsiders were trying to influence the Quints some years ago, and we were sure of it by the way they acted towards us after they had left home, and then more so when they reached their 21st birthday and came into their money.”

  “Don’t believe it!” Yvonne begged the reporter before running off in tears. “It’s not true.”

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  The four sisters said no more to the press. They appointed a spokesman and shut their apartment door, opening it only to those who knew a coded knock.

  “They love their family,” the spokesman explained. “But they do want a life of their own. Many sons and daughters move away from home and relish their independence. But they don’t love their parents any less. This is the case with the quints.”

  The newspapers were not satisfied. Reporters camped outside the sisters’ apartment, on the roof, and on the fire escape. On December 29, they reported the unmistakable sounds of a party going on inside as laughter and music came drifting beneath the Dionnes’ closed door. Back in Corbeil that same day, Victor Dionne told the press, “My father is upstairs, half sick from this whole thing.” The contrast was anything but flattering.

  Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Marie could not hide out any longer. It was plain from the front-page headlines on the papers Philippe smuggled in with their groceries that the story was not fading away. On the contrary, it only mushroomed as their brothers publicly criticized them for acting like queens and treating the family like dirt. “Silence simply was not a sufficient response,” the sisters decided. “For everyone’s sake, we had to go to Corbeil, come what may, for a fair talk with Dad. Peace had to be restored somehow.”

  Aided by a sympathetic janitor who cut the lights in the apartment building around ten p.m., Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Gerry made a break for the service elevator and felt their way through the darkened garage to a waiting car. (Marie was deemed too fragile to make the trip and stayed behind.) “It was awful,” Annette remembered. “We got down on the floor of the car so nobody could see us. We felt like thieves.”

  They drove through the night, crossing paths with a Toronto Telegram reporter and photographer at a gas station who thrust a camera into the car windows, leaving the girls “blinking like owls.” More reporters and cameramen were stationed outside the Big House gate when the car arrived in Corbeil at four a.m. Flashbulbs popped and flared as the “shaken and weary” sisters scurried from the car to the house.

  The next day, Oliva Dionne told the press that his family had exchanged kisses and presents and enjoyed a light meal before heading to bed. The whole affair, he said, had been due to “a misunderstanding somewhere, but it has all been ironed out.”

  Gerry Allard remembered receiving a very different greeting. “There was a feeling of tension as soon as we came in,” he said. “A cold welcome,” Gerry called it, with perfunctory remarks about the trip and the weather. The Dionnes opened their gifts and went upstairs to bed without a single word about the accusations that had prompted the awkward reunion.

  The next day the family was all smiles for the camera. “There was absolutely no strain or tension,” photographer Arthur Sasse, who had come to record the reconciliation, told the Toronto Star. “I didn’t have to tell anybody to smile—they did it themselves.”

  Behind the doors of Oliva’s office, however, there had been a heated exchange. Cécile led the barrage. “Why did you talk to the newspapers and start all this?” she demanded. “Why did you make trouble when we have never said a word about anything?”

  To Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile’s astonishment, their father did not thrust the blame back onto them. Oliva bore his daughters’ anger “without flinching,” and admitted his responsibility for manufacturing a crisis where there had been none. Others in the family had influenced him, he said, and he had acted on their bad advice.

  The night before, as the car approached the Big House gate, the sisters had “half hoped there would be an accident, a skid, anything that would put us into hospital so we could avoid confronting Dad.” Now they had the upper hand. “We could have said much more, you know, but we kept our mouths shut,” Cécile admonished her father. They had never breathed even a hint to the press about the hard feelings and painful memories that could have justified a family rift. Oliva acknowledged this with a nod. For the first time in their lives, they had asserted themselves—and come out unscathed.

  “There had never been a day like this,” Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile said after it was over. It was as though each of them had grown up, all at once, in that room.

  Absent from the showdown at the Big House, Marie did her growing up in her own way the following spring. She, like Annette, had yet to find her niche in the world. Opportunities for women were limited in the mid-1950s, and the sisters’ lack of knowledge and experience hampered their view even further. “So few doors seemed to stand open for us to enter,” they recalled, “and each of them had to be reassuringly familiar or we were afraid to make the effort.”

  Marie—frail, iron-willed Marie—dared to look beyond those narrow boundaries and throw open a brand-new door. If she could not be a nun, Marie decided, she would be a businesswoman. A florist. She would open her own flower shop and earn her own living.

  Annette’s boyfriend arranged for Marie to spend two months learning the ins and outs of the floral business up close, at a shop his cousin owned. She practiced buying flowers wholesale, learning how to keep them fresh, display them, and arrange them. Cécile’s boyfriend also took the project under his wing and spent a week or two observing alongside Marie so that he might lend a hand in the setup and day-to-day operations of her shop.

  The only problem was money. When Marie appealed to the guardians of the trust—one of whom was her father—to release funds for her business, she was “turned down flat.” Marie remained undaunted. “Whatever happens, I intend to go ahead,” she insisted.

  Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile contributed a few hundred dollars from savings accounts they held in North Bay. They also temporarily rerouted their parents’ $300 allowance to Marie. It was not nearly enough—until Marie remembered her charge account at Eaton’s department sto
re. All four of them had one. They could buy whatever they liked, and the bills were sent to the trust committee at the end of the month. Marie boldly charged everything from the stationery to the counters and showcases to her Eaton’s account.

  “It was a wonderful adventure,” her sisters remembered. “The other three of us had every bit as much fun as she did. For us, who had respected authority perhaps more than most people, Marie’s defiant assertion of the right to do as she pleased was exhilarating. Her accounts of each day’s excursions were listened to intently, often in peals of laughter. We could picture the faces of the trustees when the bills came home to roost.”

  Salon Émilie opened to great fanfare on Mother’s Day of 1956. Newsreel cameras captured a quartet of smiles as Marie cut the ribbon and accepted congratulatory kisses from Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile. Everyone who walked in the door received a fat red rose. Some came again and again, accumulating a free bouquet before the doors closed for the night. At the end of the day, Marie had given away $600 worth of flowers.

  Despite her customers’ greed, Marie was thrilled—“too thrilled to complain,” her sisters remembered. The shop revived Marie for the first time since Émilie’s death. “She was not the same person after it opened,” Philippe Langlois recalled. “She was still timid, but she could go up to people. She worked hard, very hard.”

  Nevertheless, Salon Émilie “refused to prosper.” Marie could not resist giving flowers away to friends, and to churches for their altars. Nuns soliciting for charity often left the shop with cash donations straight from the register drawer. The shop lasted only six months—a “bitter blow” for Marie. “She was very discouraged, dispirited,” Annette said. “She lost a lot of money from her trust allowance.”

  Yet her sisters refused to see Marie’s business venture as a defeat. As far as Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile were concerned, Salon Émilie had broken Marie free of the frustrations and fears that being a quintuplet had instilled in her. “The experiment was worth far, far more than it cost,” they said, “for who can set a cash price on freedom?”

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  Meanwhile, the way Gerry and Philippe had pitched in to help Marie drew Annette’s and Cécile’s hearts ever closer to the two young men. It had taken two years for Cécile to consider Philippe Langlois more than a friend. “I think the first thing that made me think of Phil this way was when I came in contact with babies in the hospital,” she hinted. More and more, the idea of marriage occupied Annette’s and Cécile’s thoughts.

  Annette left school in June of 1957. She and Gerry married that October, in a private Montreal ceremony conducted behind locked doors. Sixteen friends and relatives watched as the couple, dressed in coordinating brown suits, pledged their vows to each other.

  Cécile and Philippe followed in November. Cécile envisioned her wedding day not only as the celebration of a new life with Philippe, but also as a chance to mend her family’s old wounds. This time, she promised herself, I’ll get it right for Mom and Dad and me. No expense was spared, and no one was shut out as Cécile floated down the aisle of Corbeil’s Sacred Heart Church in her gown of silk, Swiss lace, and pearls—not even the press and the news cameras. “Blazing flashbulbs lit up the altar like a movie studio,” the Toronto Star reported. Afterward the entire family—eighty guests in all—sat down together for a luncheon in North Bay. “I thought that all would be fixed,” she said later, “that it would arrange communication between them and ourselves.” (It didn’t. The day consumed $10,000 from her trust account, and relations between the two halves of the family remained as awkward as ever.)

  Before departing for her three-week honeymoon, Cécile stopped at the Sacred Heart cemetery and placed her bouquet of sweetheart roses, orchids, and mums on Émilie’s grave.

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  Cécile and Annette shared an ambition “to become the most suburban of housewives, indistinguishable from young brides anywhere.” They learned to navigate beauty parlors, grocery stores, and department stores without hiding behind dark sunglasses and false names. They cooked and cleaned, painted and wallpapered, and mastered the trick of hanging the wash out to dry without cringing at the thought of neighbors’ eyes upon them. “To Annette, that is a very real luxury—not to be stared at,” Gerry said. His wife, he remembered, “was blooming.” Within a few months, both sisters were pregnant.

  It should have been joyous news. Annette had nurtured a dream of having a family of her own from the time she was a teenager. “Nothing has made me so happy in all my life as the thought of having a baby,” she said. Like Annette, Cécile treasured the thought of having a little girl she could call Émilie. Instead, fear tainted their excitement. A French biologist had declared when the sisters were infants that quintuplets could not have children. Though he had never examined them and had no medical basis for his claim, a nurse who worked with Yvonne and Cécile at Hôpital Notre-Dame de l’Espérance agreed with the Frenchman’s pronouncement. Their conviction left Cécile gripped with the certainty that she would die in childbirth. Annette lived in dread of delivering a freakish, misshapen baby. Neither of them could be convinced otherwise.

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  While Annette and Cécile brooded over their impending deliveries, Marie groped for a new foothold in the world. Bereft of her flower shop, she grappled with bouts of depression and frail health that put her in and out of the hospital as her weight dropped and she succumbed to fainting spells. For a time Marie managed to hold a job in another flower shop, under the name Denise Mousseau. It was under this name that she met Florian Houle, a civil servant in his forties, at Mass. The two began attending movies together. Only when Marie mentioned one night at dinner that she had weighed barely a pound at birth did Florian begin to realize who she was. The two were married in absolute secret on August 13, 1958. Out of respect for Marie’s desperate wish for privacy from the press, Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile did not attend; their presence would only attract attention.

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  Cécile’s one wish as the final weeks before her due date dwindled into days was simply to see her baby before she died, and so she chose to have no pain medications during her labor. She did not want to risk having her few precious moments with her child dulled by anesthesia. Yvonne would be by her side, for the hospital had granted her the special privilege of attending Cécile’s delivery.

  When the dreaded yet hoped-for moment came and the seven-pound, four-ounce baby boy was laid in his mother’s arms, it was Yvonne, not Cécile, who “shook with sobs of exhaustion and joy.” Cécile was almost too stunned by the fact that she was still alive to react. “How marvelous it is to watch the birth,” she said weakly. She and Philippe named their son Claude. Another son, Patrice, would follow in 1960, then twins Bruno and Bertrand in 1961, and daughter Elisabeth in 1962.

  Cécile’s good fortune did little to ease Annette’s worries. The fear of a grotesquely ill-formed baby consumed her for another six weeks—until little Jean-François Allard proved her entirely wrong when he arrived whole and handsome on November 2, 1958. Annette had two more sons: Charles in 1961, and Eric in 1962.

  Only Marie entered into motherhood without fear. The miscarriages that claimed the lives of her first two babies did not sway her from the path she had set for herself, and Christmas Eve of 1960 brought Marie her greatest gift: a daughter. The little girl, “bright and gay as a bird,” was christened Émilie. Another daughter, Monique, was born to Marie and Florian two years later.

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  Though she doted on her nieces and nephews, Yvonne was not drawn toward marriage and children of her own. “She asked for little more than the immense satisfaction of serving the sick, most of all in the children’s wards, and in observing the colors and shapes of the world for interpretation in her painting,” her sisters said.

  Yvonn
e spent her first summer after nursing school at a camp for disabled children, then took on private nursing jobs. For a few months she studied wood carving and sculpting. Despite her apparent potential, her teacher recalled her as “very bashful, having no confidence in herself.” Like Émilie and Marie before her, Yvonne felt called to use her nursing skills in service to God. “I don’t think I was ever good enough as a sculptor to become professional,” she said. “My desire to be a nun became much stronger.”

  The Convent of the Little Franciscan Sisters, on the northern shore of the St. Lawrence River in Baie-Saint-Paul, became Yvonne’s chosen community. The periods of silent reflection before Mass and during the Grand Silence each day dovetailed seamlessly with her quiet, interior nature. “It shaped me,” she said of her experience there. Within the shelter of the convent, nothing and no one prompted her to dwell on the past—something Yvonne always assiduously avoided.

  “I don’t want to think about ‘little Yvonne,’ ” she said of her childhood. “No. I put an end to it. I want to live in the present, that’s all.” Through the meditation she learned in Baie-Saint-Paul, Yvonne made a conscious effort to subdue the most painful of her memories, such as Émilie’s funeral. “I want to go forward,” she said, “and see the beautiful things in life. Because there is no use to put the knife into the wound.”

  Yvonne would have been happy to devote her life to the Little Franciscan Sisters, but it was not to be. When it was time for the novitiates to take their vows, the Mother Superior informed Yvonne that she would not be among them. No reason was given. “They just tell you it’s not your place,” Yvonne remembered. “What could I do? I didn’t understand it, but there was nothing I could do about it. I was hurt. I thought I had the vocation, the calling. I thought I’d be happy there. I would have liked to stay, but that’s life. I didn’t want to become sick over it.” She tried again, at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Moncton, New Brunswick. After five years, she was told once more that she was not suited for life as a nun.