Oliva Dionne, the quintuplets’ father, had this souvenir and refreshment stand at Quintland, where the public flocked to view the girls playing. Montreal Gazette files

The news media is always stuffed with sad and shocking news, some of an international character, other items closer to home, as it were. In our morning papers today there was news of the remaining two Dionne quintuplets, once viewed internationally as a sensation. The sisters born to a poor farming family in northern Ontario, represented the first time quintuplets in their entirety survived. And that was largely because the Government of Ontario at the time removed them immediately on birth from the care of their parents, building a medical facility specifically to house the babies and to confer expert medical care to ensure their survival.

At the same time, the Ontario government viewed the babies and their spectacular place in human curiosity on a world scale about their rarity, saw the quintuplets as a cash cow. They undertook to care for the babies into infancy and then childhood to give them a healthy start in life, and at the same time presented the children in their special facility as a exhibition for the public to pay a fee to be able to observe and admire them. The spin-off from ancillary products like dolls and china depicting the girls garnered further unprincipled riches to the province's treasury through marketing a coveted brand.

1940: The Dionne quintuplets starting first grade at six years old. Back row: Annette, Cecile and Yvonne; front, Emile and Marie. Instruction is conducted in French by Mille. Gaetane Vezina, appointed by the provincial board of education. Montreal Gazette files

Even the modest property of the parents with its rough log home was a place of great curiosity to the public willing to pay for the privilege of walking around the place and meeting the parents -- Elzire and Oliva Dionne -- of the famed children, enabling the girls' parents to amass a considerable fortune at the time. A fortune that their parents used to build a mansion of 19 rooms where the girls, at age 9, were housed once the parents won custody through a judicial decision. And where the girls as adults later claimed to have been sexually abused by their father and beaten by their mother.

1943: The Dionne quintuplets shortly before their 9th birthday. Montreal Gazette files

Those girls were born in 1934, and so the remaining sisters, Cecile and Annette are now 82 years old. Cecile's health is quite impaired while her sister's is more intact, enabling her to live independently in a middle-class condo in Quebec. Cecile, on the other hand, has more serious health problems requiring care, and she, living on a government pension of $1,443 monthly is a ward of the province of Quebec at an assigned privately owned seniors' residence in Montreal's north end. Cecile doesn't quite approve of the class of people living in the residence, but declared incapacitated by the Public Curator of Quebec must live where she is assigned to.

The sisters launched a legal suit against the Government of Ontario on the basis of having been exploited, and they were awarded a $4-million pay-out cash settlement in 1998. Cecile claims that her son Bertrand Langlois, third of her four children, took advantage of her to abscond with her money, effectively leaving her penniless. "I have no more money. So they put me under curatorship", she explained to the Montreal Gazette. Living in circumstances she deplores, complaining about the food, the service, the other residents, she thought of escape.

"But then I told myself, it's ridiculous to think like that. I said to myself, I just have to get used to it. I got it into my head that I have to do my best to accept it and to get to know the people better. And that helps me. They're not bad people. It’s difficult, because the screening is not selective, so the people are not always easy to live with. And the food is bad. At my age, it's difficult. But I clench my fists and I keep my head high", she said.

Cécile Dionne (right), with her sister Annette (they are the two surviving Dionne quintuplets, born in Ontario in 1934), places a photo of themselves and their sisters when they were children onto a a desk at the St. Bruno home of Annette. John Kenney / MONTREAL GAZETTE