Paulina, who ran away at fourteen

Paulina Scheuber was born on 20 January 1864 at the Schlüssel inn in Büren, the sixth of ten children of Kaspar and Josepha Scheuber. In 1878, aged fourteen, she boarded the mail coach outside the house one morning without telling her parents and travelled via Lucerne to Nervi near Genoa, where an older sister worked. Her grandmother in Stans, the only one in on the plan, had given her the fare.

At the guesthouse she stood in for the sick cook and was taken on for good. A family from Buenos Aires took her to Argentina as their nanny. When a fire broke out at the opera, she had led the five children outside just before. She stayed nine years in Buenos Aires and there, by chance, found her long-lost brother Josef.

At 24 she returned to Nervi and bought the «Pagoda», a house in Chinese style, at auction. She turned it into a restaurant with staff in Chinese dress and a ladies’ band in the hall of mirrors, and later into the Hotel Schweizerhof with the houses Pagoda, Paradiso and Kursaal. In 1897 she married the German confectioner Christian Friedrich Mulisch; the marriage remained childless.

In the First World War her marriage made her a German in Italian eyes. Her husband fled, she herself went to Büren, and the Pagoda was seized as enemy property. Because she had left a farmer’s wife a few silver spoons as a pledge when she left, she was convicted in her absence. She gave herself up in Genoa, spent a month in custody, was acquitted and fought for her house all the way to the supreme court in Rome. At 88 she returned to Switzerland and died in Riggisberg on 19 July 1953.

Sources: Emil Christen, «Mit 14 Jahren zu Hause ausgerissen, mit 89 Jahren als Lady verstorben», Nidwaldner Tagblatt, 19 January 1984; Peter Steiner’s notes on the 3rd edition of the Book of the Scheuber.