A FAMILY TRAGEDY

Today, Cecile Dionne looks much like any other suburban grandmother, but she and her four identical sisters were once the most celebrated children on the face of the planet. They were known to the world as the Dionne Quintuplets.

25-year-old Elzire Dionne, already the mother of five children, gave birth to the quintuplets in May, 1934. Identical sisters were born in the family home in rural Ontario. No one expected the five tiny infants to survive. But when Annette, Emilie, Yvonne, Cecile and Marie did – the first quintuplets ever do so – they became a sensation.

Within days of their birth, their father sold a promoter the rights to exhibit his daughters. Stung by the resultant public outcry, the Ontario government stepped in. The girls were taken away from their parents and placed under the care of a board of guardians.

It was not long, however, before the guardians, too, began to exploit them. The Ontario authorities built a nine-room nursery on Oliva’s farm right across the road from the family home, later expanding it into a bizarre facility nicknamed “Quintland”. It included a horseshoe-shaped observatory, where crowds peered through screened glass windows while the little girls played.

The quints soon developed into a major tourist attraction, drawing as many as 10,000 visitors a month.

The quints should have earned a fortune, certainly enough to last them the rest of their lives. They were on the covers of magazines. They appeared in films and on radio. Still, by the time they were seven years old in 1941, $ 1 million had accumulated in a trust account held for the girls until they turned 21 in 1955. The quints were finally reunited with their parents and siblings three more were born after them) when they were nine. Around that time, the parents won back custody of the girls and greater access to the trust fund fed by their earnings.

Cecile has decidedly mixed feelings about her parents. In television drama her mother is portrayed as consumed by love for the five little girls. That is not the way Cecile remembered her. “I didn’t even really know my mother. She was always too busy. But I suppose there were too many for her to love. After all, she already had seven other kids by the time we went back to the big house.” If there is a glimmer of sympathy in Cecile’s attitude to her mother, there is little for her father. “He was a difficult man to know and communicate”, she says.

The difficult moments came later, after the Dionnes were reunited. There were two distinct entities in the family. On the one hand, there were the five little girls who had finally returned home. On the other, there were brothers and sisters who were both proud and envious at the same time. It was not an easy situation. Cecile remembers it well. “We lived separate lives”, she says. “But there was always so much tension in our relationships, always so many quarrels. Our brothers and sisters, even our parents, always thought that we were the cause of their misery, their unhappiness”.


A1 The Dionne sisters became so famous because they were the only quintuplets:
1.
who had lived past infancy.

2.
who were not born in a hospital.

3.
whose mother had already had children.

4.
who nearly died at birth.



A2 Why did the Ontario government take the girls away from their parents?
1.
They thought their parents would cause problems.

2.
They thought their father was exploiting them.

3.
They responded to people’s reaction to the quints’ situation.

4.
They wanted to make money out of the girls.



A3 What is Cecile’s lasting impression of the quints’ early years at Quitland?
1.
The nurses were cruel to them.

2.
The other quints missed their parents.

3.
People made a lot of fuss of them.

4.
They had very little privacy.



A4 What happened when the quints were nine?
1.
Their mother had triplets.

2.
They gained more control over their finances.

3.
They earned $ 1 million dollars.

4.
They went back to live with the rest of the family.



A5 How does Cecile feel about her parents?
1.
She feels sorry for them both for having had such a large family.

2.
She appreciates the difficulty of her mother’s situation.

3.
She wishes she had been able to talk to her father.

4.
She feels they were not properly portrayed in a book and TV programme.



A6 Why was life more difficult when the quints moved back to live with their family?
1.
The family were divided over what to do with quints’ earnings.

2.
The other Dionne children felt ambivalent about them.

3.
The girls couldn’t spend as much time together as they had before.

4.
They made the rest of the family miserable by quarrelling all the time.



A7 How does the writer of the article react to Cecile’s account of her childhood?
1.
She is not convicted by it.

2.
She accept it as fact.

3.
She thinks Cecile is concealing the truth.

4.
She thinks Cecile is exaggerating.