Pauline Musters, alias Princess Pauline (1878-1895)
Pauline Musters was born on February 26, 1878 in the village of Ossendrecht, the Netherlands, close to the Belgian border. Her parents Anna Couwenbergh and Michiel Musters were very poor. Michiel took a loan to build a humble house, unfortunately, this burned down in a thunderstorm. Shortly after, Pauline was born, being their 5th child. They lived in a barn at that time. She was only 30 cm tall (11.81 inch) and they didn’t expect her to survive, but the little girl stayed alive.
Afterwards, more children were born, 11 in total, of which 8 remained alive.
To earn some extra money, her parents started to expose Pauline at the fairs in the neighborhood.
1878
Her first performance at the fair of Stabroek, a village nearby in Belgium. She was about 6 months old.
1880
January – March: successful performance at a theater at the St. Pieterssquare in Brussels, Belgium.
May-August: Tour around Belgian cities like Brugge and Liege.
End of November: by steam train to Paris where she performed the whole month of December at the Folies Bergère together with the Russian giant Nicolai Simonoff.
1881
A series of performances at the Hippodrôme at the Seine, followed by the Théâtre Robert Houdin and the Cirque Fernando (all in Paris) and the fair in Gent (Belgium). All performances were from 14:00-17:00 hours in the afternoon and from 20:00-22:00 in the evening.
Beginning April: back home in Ossendrecht.
May 7: Performance in Leipzig, Germany as “the kleinste Liliputanerin der Welt”. (The smallest dwarf of the world)
Later this year there are performances in Paris. The stay during the Winter in Nantes (France) at the Place de Bretagne where the Circus Continental was located.
1882
March: performances in Castan’s Panoptikum at the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin (Germany). Here, people were exhibited and some text explained their story, but they did not speak themselves. Pauline could be seen from 11:00-13:00 and 16:00-21:00 hrs.
1883
Performances in Bordeaux and other cities in France.
1884
Tour in Belgium
1885
April: performances in the permanent Cirque Fernando at Montmartre Paris.
June: Shows in Saint Germain en Laye, outskirt of Paris.
The rest of the year: shows in Colombier, Péerigueux and La Rochelle (all in France), Berlin and Stuttgart (in Germany).
1887
A series of shows in France.
September: Fair of Ossendrecht immediately followed to performances at the Folies Bergère in Paris.
End of the year she travels to Crystal Palace (London).
1888
Performances in Belgium, France and Germany
1889
Father Michiel Musters passes away on March 6.
1890
Mother Anna starts again touring with her in Belgium and France. At this time Pauline is 12 years old.
Her daughter Cornelia (Kee) and her husband Joseph Verschueren take over management and continue the exposure of little Pauline.
1891
End of this year she went to Reynold’s wax museum in Edinborough and had a show at the fair of Waverly Market of Horace Edward Moss. She was almost non-stop performing.
1892
From Edinborough she went by train to Liverpool to act als weighlifter, acrobate, dancer and pantomime player.
After her 14th birthday on February 26, they returned to Ossendrecht.
In April she was invited to meet queen Emma of the Netherlands.
After this event she went to W. Sürings Universum, a wax cabinet in Germany where she performed with “Das Riesenkind Ella” (the giant child Ella).
May: Panoptikum in Berlin, together with “Aama, the French Giant” being “the giant and the doll fairy”.
Summer: return to Ossendrecht.
October 9-November 20: Performance at the Trocadero theatre in London. An advertisement of this theater at the Shafteesbury Avenue shows Paulina together with
the Prussian weightlifter Eugene Sandow, being the main act. After this period, she travels to Wales.
1893
March: return to the Netherlands with performances at the theatre Tivoli in Rotterdam and in the city of Roosendaal.
Rest of the year: performances in (currently) Poland, England, Scotland and Wales.
1894
March: Performances in Gent (Belgium) at Sam Lockhart’s Circus. Pauline is balancing on Sjef’s hand, doing some gymnastics, jumping from a table, singing a song, running around the circus and lifting (fake) weights.
On March 22 she has her first Holy Communion in a chapel of a cloister nearby the city center.
Till end of September: performances in Liverpool and followed by shows in Cardiff.
Here, John Percival Hyatt, the English theatre agent for Frederic Proctor, offered her $1000 a week for performances at Proctor’s theater on Broadway for a whole year.
With SS Normannia Kee, Sjef and Pauline travel from Hamburg via Southampton to New York where they arrive on November 18. They stay at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
On December 24 she started her very successful shows at the 23rd Street Theatre on Broadway.
1895
On February 7, she had to stop performing because of a severe cold. Followed by Pneumonia and Meningitis, she passed away on February 15, 1895, almost 17 years old.
She then was 24 inch tall.
After a ceremony on Februari 19, organized by colleagues from Broadway, Sjef and Kee return with the embalmed body of Pauline with ss Belgenland to Europe.
They arrive on March 6 with the steamtram in Ossendrecht where on Friday morning, March 8, the funeral took place. This event attracted many people to say a last farewell to her.
In Ossendrecht, the museum Den Aanwas is partly dedicated to her. A group of 8 volunteers is searching for new facts about Princess Pauline.
There are many publications in newspapers from 1878-1895, but recently we found a very valuable document. An article in the Baltimore Sunday Herald was published in August 1896 (1,5 year after her death) and was written by Dr. James Darwin Nagel, the doctor who was taking care of her when she became ill in New York and he even was there when she passed away. It confirmed the cause of death, the story that she was an alcohol addicted and he even measured all parts of her body. In the newspaper there was also a drawing of the death mask he made. Our search to the original death mask brought us to Guinness World Records who did not know much about her, even when she’s known being the shortest woman ever. We shared details we know and now her story is available on the website of Guinness.
In our search for descendants, we found 3 great-grandchildren of Pauline’s brother Victor, who moved to France early 1900. They live close to Paris and we exchanged information. Through them we met people of the Musée Carnevalet in Paris, who had original posters of Pauline’s performances in the Folies Bergère. It was a very interesting meeting.
We had some articles in local newspapers, as well in the national newspaper of Belgium. We emphasized that we would love to get in contact with descendants of the family. This brought us to a grandchild of Kee and Joseph Verschueren. We were able to obtain a medallion with a very nice portrait of Pauline. This Summer, it will be X-rayed in the university of Delft, to see if there’s something hidden in the jewel. A hair would be great to do DNA research.
We have a picture from a small carriage (90 cm heigh). The magazine where this picture was published (1909) states that this carriage (with dogs) was a present from the German Kaiser (emperor) Wilhelm II to Pauline. The story tells that she used it when traveling in Berlin.
We bought a tiny chair that was from Castan’s Panoptikum, she must have used it on stage.
Our main questions are now:
1. Where is the original death mask?
2. Where is the carriage?
3. Where are the other descendants?
Attachments:
1. Newspaper Baltimore Sunday Herald
2. Family tree Musters Family
3. Poster Folies Bergère
4. Picture Medaillon
