Ferdinand owed his principality to his mother, Princess Clementine of Orleans, the youngest and cleverest daughter of the French King Louis Philippe. He owed also his capacity for filling the position to the training bestowed upon him by that truly remarkable woman. It was a peculiar training, for he was trained to fill a hypothetical throne. Make a king of him, was his mother’s motto, and the kingdom is sure to turn up some day.

Clementine of Orleans was one of the stormy petrels of European inner politics. “The Czar’s nightmare, the Austrian Emperor’s bogey, and Bismarck’s sleeping draught” had been the epigrammatic description of the rÔle she played, thrown off after deep consideration by an English diplomatist who worked out his impromptus very thoroughly.

She had married Prince Augustus of Saxe-Coburg Kohary, and by the Kohary hangs a tale. It was supposed by the vulgar to be an additional title, but it really was an excrescence on the Saxe-Coburg appellation, tacked on in return for some millions in hard cash. The original Kohary was a swindling army contractor whose name in England would be Cohen. He had made untold wealth by a system of army contracting which has its feeble imitators at the present day, and he cherished high ambitions for his pretty daughter Tony.

She, and her wealth, attracted the notice of that poverty-stricken prince, Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg, grandfather of Bulgaria’s elect. The wedding and the dowry were arranged, and the condition exacted by the man of millions was that the Kohary should appear in the princely title. So it was; though Prince Augustus, at the instigation of his spouse Clementine, dropped the Cohen as soon as he conscientiously could. But there it was, and when, many years afterwards, Ferdinand of Bulgaria was able to address a deputation of Jewish merchants in their native Yiddish, gossips recalled a circumstance which explained why he was the only European ruler who could claim such an accomplishment.

But the Princess Clementine moved in a circle that had the discernment to see that the brand of Kohary was not upon her. She bore rather the stamp of the Bourbons, and to the very last of her extreme old age preserved the aristocratic air that became a daughter of Louis Philippe. She inherited immense wealth, and knew how to take care of it. Two passions possessed her in her life. The first was to restore the monarchical line in France, and to that end she plotted skilfully and unsuccessfully. The other was to realize in the person of her youngest son a prophecy that affected her most profoundly when it was delivered, and obtained a greater hold upon her with each succeeding year of her life.

The prophecy was delivered by a very old and unsightly gipsy woman who cajoled the Princess into permitting an inspection of her hand. The sybil declared that one of the sons of Clementine would one day reign a crowned king. The forecast was in accordance with the ambition and training of this remarkable woman, who at once decided that Ferdinand, the youngest and brightest of her boys, must be the instrument of its fulfilment.

She had sat at the feet of the most astute statesmen of her time, and had earned the appellation of “a Talleyrand in petticoats.” Those who knew her best believed fondly that she was beyond all delusions; they learned their error when they found what schemes she was cherishing for the unlovable Ferdinand. She set her heart upon a throne for him, though what throne she could not even dimly discern.

The kind of education this boy received from the sparkling, cynical, witty Frenchwoman can be imagined. Every step of his career is eloquent of the lessons he learned, and of how well he learned them. She taught him that love was a weak passion, since it gave some clinging woman the right to impose herself as a burden upon a strong man. She taught him the value of influential friends, and how to take any amount of snubbing from any one who might eventually be of use to him.

From Court to Court of Europe she dragged him at an age when most boys are immersed in manly sports and the hard regime of ordinary education. He became the most accomplished young prince in all Europe in the matter of modern languages, though by a strange oversight she never caused him to learn Bulgarian. He knew everybody, and was seen everywhere. Not one of his great pack of relatives escaped his acquaintance; she insinuated to them, one and all, that in his case the claims of consanguinity could not be overlooked.

She inspired in him a feminine horror of being deceived. To this day he dreads that possibility more than anything else, save only assassination. No better training in the art of deception could possibly be devised than to keep a youth constantly on the look-out for deception. At a comparatively early age Ferdinand became a past master in all the arts of simulation and deceit.

The masculine side of his education was neglected. He never learned to play games like other boys; he never learned the ordinary accomplishment of princes, the mastery of a horse. He lived in an atmosphere of womanly luxury, so that sweet perfumes and pretty flowers became necessaries of life to him.

He was by nature a fop. All the arts of dandyism were practised by him, his clothes affected his gait. He flitted from Court to Court, and the more formal the Court the greater his admiration for it. Display was to him a part of kingship; one of the most tangible and real attributes of royalty.

Thus, although he had not the most remote hope of legitimate succession to a throne, at twenty he was possessed of a complete theory of kingship. His mother, who appraised the whole world at its most just value, and could discriminate between the instant value of a King of England and a Czar of Russia, gave to him the undiscriminating worship that she denied to any other human being, even in a fractional degree. But there was no sign of the throne for which he had been so carefully trained.

Therefore, at the age of twenty Ferdinand had to join the Austrian Army as a sub-lieutenant. He was no soldier by nature, and his training had unfitted him for the vocation in a marked degree. He had inherited a nervous disposition, that made the occupation selected for him a lifelong misery. His first commission was in a cavalry regiment, but his execrable horsemanship soon caused him to be transferred to a foot regiment. It was as a lieutenant of Jaegers that he was apparelled on that memorable day when the tired Bulgarian envoys first saw him in the Vienna beer garden.

The clever old woman and the calculating young man had been expecting them. The net was spread and richly baited from the millions of Clementine. All that money and cunning could do to win him the vacant princedom had been done. The result has already been told.

His mother trained Ferdinand for a throne, and her influence and her wealth made for him the opportunity. As his story is unfolded, we shall see her continually at his elbow, prompting him in all the tangled affairs of his statecraft. Her love for him never waned, and to the last he was the object of adoration of the most sophisticated woman that ever adorned a Court in Europe.

Her death deprived him of the best counsellor and the most powerful friend that such a prince has ever been known to possess. The gap it left in his councils will be illustrated in the course of this narrative. She died in her beloved Vienna in February, 1907, at the age of eighty-nine. Her three sons, Ferdinand of Bulgaria, Augustus son-in-law of the deposed Emperor of Brazil, and Philip, son-in-law of King Leopold of the Belgians, stood at her bedside as she passed away.

The thing she had lived to bring about had not yet come to pass. Ferdinand made himself Czar of the Bulgarians in 1908. The poor old Princess died just a year too soon.