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You might wonder about the wisdom of this technique, and about how well advised the sisters are in their dealings with the media. (Last year, they gave – or sold – their blessing to Million- Dollar Babies, which had a significantly more positive take on the parents; and they provided the National Enquirer with an exclusive 60th birthday photograph.) But they have only their story to sell, and they say they need the money; Cecile Dionne is ready to acknowledge cash as the primary, if not exclusive, purpose of Secrets de Famille. (There is, too, a therapeutic ambition.) And despite some murmurings in Montreal, the tales of abuse do not arrive from nowhere, whipped up to draw a fresh, Oprah-viewing, abuse-sensitive audience to a flagging old story. In We Were Five, their 1965 autobiography, it’s already there, between the lines.

(On rides with their father in the car: “A sense of shyness was deeply rooted in all five of us. Sitting on laps, having arms around our shoulders and elbows in our ribs offended our susceptibilities. No matter if the evening was warm or chilly, we wrapped ourselves in topcoats for protection on those outings…”) The Dionnes may be the least expert children in the world to judge the proper limits of physical parental contact (for nine years they had almost none), but they are telling a story that has clearly preyed on them for a long time. Cecile Dionne told me: “Dad asked me to be his mistress and I refused, so after that I didn’t have any bad things…” With Yvonne he was more insistent: “He wanted her to go inside and to lie on the bed. But Yvonne didn’t want to go inside…” (And she did not.)Cecile Dionne is glad now to have unburdened herself of all this. “Now I feel strong,” she said, “and comfortable.” Cecile’s adult son, Bertrand Dionne (whose twin brother died in infancy), told me: “It’s a good thing that she liberates those things I see her face every day She’s more happy And there’s a difference with Annette and Yvonne It’s remarkable. It’s part of the healing therapy.”CECILE DIONNE had a childhood in two distinct halves.

Secrets de Famille starts with the return of the Dionne quintuplets to their parents, in 1943: they carried little suitcases a few yards “home” But by 1943, Cecile Dionne had already lived one life. She had spent nine years in the Quintland nursery – a place easy to see into, hard to see out of “It wasn’t human, I think,” she said to me. “It was a circus”.Or it was a boarding school that starts at the age of nought, or a laboratory: “The whole thing was quite severe for babies and young children. Starting at six o’clock, until six o’clock at night, we had 21 items to accomplish. A time to go to the toilet, all of that.” A time to eat, to play – and to meet one’s public. In the early days, the various nurses who catered for the quintuplets would take them on to the nursery balcony and show them, one at a time, to the crowds below, with an accompanying card carrying their name. (In fact, it was usually simpler and safer to lift the same baby five times and change only the card.) Later, the Quints were viewed three times a day from the gauze- covered corridor Cecile says: “We saw moving.

We heard sounds.”With the blessing of the all-powerful doctor in charge of the nursery – Dafoe – the quintuplets’ early routine was set by the St George’s School for Child Study at the University of Toronto The Toronto findings, published in 1937, are odd. (If it is hard to understand Quintland today, it seems also to have been hard then.) The picture captions alone reveal an uncertain agenda. A walking Quint is captioned with anthropological sobriety – “Progress in locomotion” – but an eating Quint is given a kind of Pathe newsreel puff: “Cafeteria service – and Annette has her eye on the dessert.” The scientists seem not to have known quite what to do, perhaps because they had to negotiate their way round two unacknowledgeable facts. One: although these children were being kept in a “hospital”, they were not sick – their health clearly did not depend on isolation, even if that of the Ontario economy did.