We have seen Ferdinand waiting for a Crown to turn up. We have seen him striving vainly for a friendly lead to recognition as a Sovereign Prince by the Powers of Europe. Now this Micawber among Monarchs is revealed as waiting anxiously and servilely for a suitable bride to appear. And in the search for a wife he endured the most poignant humiliations that have overtaken even him in a long life spent in eating dirt.

Ambitious Clementine wished him to espouse a princess who would not only furnish an heir to the throne, but would bring influence to his palace, and help materially in the long quest for recognition. But the princesses of Europe, and the advisers who guided their choice of a consort, looked with disdain upon the princely parvenu. Queen Victoria, who was amused at his flattering speech and grand airs, drew the line at an alliance with a prince whose tenure of the throne was so doubtful as that of Ferdinand’s.

That he may have expected; but the conduct of the smaller kingdoms filled him with surprise and resentment. He might not aspire anywhere, and the fact was conveyed to him in a fashion so unmistakable that he was at the utmost pains to conceal his deep chagrin.

Finally a match was made for him by his mother. The victim was a dear little meek soul, a devout Catholic, and one of the gentlest spirits of her time—Princess Marie Louise of Parma, a niece of the Comte de Chambord. She was remarkably beautiful in a tiny way, with reddish-brown hair, large blue eyes, and a simple dignity that won all hearts.

The wedding took place at Lianore, in Lucca, and old Stambuloff paid the Princess the rare compliment of leaving his close watch on the affairs of Bulgaria long enough to attend the wedding. He was charmed with the sweet, pleasant girl of twenty-three, and in a message to her father declared “Bulgaria will honour and watch over her.” As far as he could, he kept the promise he made on that occasion.

Stambuloff was just as anxious to see Ferdinand wedded as was Clementine. “We want a dynasty,” he urged on Ferdinand, “and our enemies want you to remain a bachelor. As long as you are unmarried you are in danger of assassination, and we are in danger of anarchy. When you are once married and possessed of a son and heir, they will not try to kill you. But even if you are assassinated, it won’t matter to us then.” It was frankness of this kind which endeared his Premier to Ferdinand.

The Sultan Abdul had the grace to telegraph congratulations to Ferdinand on the occasion of his marriage. “You have strengthened the Bulgarian Principality,” he declared, with other courteous phrases, all of which Ferdinand read as a reminder of his state of vassalage.

The Duke of Parma made one condition of importance when giving his consent to the wedding. He insisted that the children of the marriage should be baptized into the Catholic Church, and should be brought up in that faith. Ferdinand himself was a Catholic, if he was anything at all, and the condition was therefore the more reasonable. But the official religion of Bulgaria is, of course, the Orthodox Church, and the masses are bigoted in their adherence to that faith.

The real difficulty lay in an article of the Bulgarian Constitution that provided that the heir to the throne must be baptized according to the rites of the Orthodox Church. This difficulty was met by Stambuloff in his own downright fashion. He annulled it, to the horror of the Bulgarian Churchmen, and made the marriage possible.

The Princess won the hearts of her new subjects from the very moment of her arrival in Bulgaria. She had the sympathetic notion to enter the Principality attired in the costume of an ordinary Bulgarian woman, and it became her girlish beauty charmingly. Her frank unaffected interest in all she saw, her gracious acceptance of the little gifts, and the somewhat boorish homage paid her on her journey, gave her a reputation that preceded her to Sofia. She retained the instant popularity she won till the day of her death six years later. She was as much loved in Bulgaria as Ferdinand was detested.

The treatment accorded her by her husband, almost from the day of her wedding, was well calculated to shrivel such a gentle soul, and to extinguish the spark of life in so frail a frame. The absurd formality of his Court imposed upon her tasks that wearied her almost to unconsciousness. She had nothing in common with her crafty, ambitious husband, who had taken her into a nightmare land where assassination and worse horrors lurked perpetually in the dark corners of the magnificent palaces she occupied.

Four children she bore him in six years. Once she left him, as a protest against the shameless breach of the conditions under which she consented to wed him. During that period of separation her friends and relatives made public details of the torture of her married life that left Ferdinand’s callous nature exposed to the full gaze of the world.

It was told how, in order to punish one of her favourite Court ladies for some indiscretion of speech, Ferdinand rose to his feet, and remained standing for over an hour. This imposed a standing posture upon the whole of the Court, including the Princess, who had but lately become a mother. The whole Court looked on in horror as this fragile flower grew whiter and whiter in her robes of State, maintaining herself in an upright position with the acme of physical effort.

Unheeding her sufferings, Ferdinand held grimly on, and when she finally fell fainting into the arms of one of her ladies, watched her removal from the chamber with unmoved grimness. That is only one among thousands of instances of refined cruelty alleged against him and credited by his subjects. Little wonder that as he drove through the streets of Sofia the people turned away their faces, unwilling even to look upon so mean-spirited a domestic tyrant.

I shall presently give the details of the blasphemous breach of faith that caused her to leave him, and nearly brought about his excommunication at the hands of the Pope. In the end she was persuaded to return to him, but she did not long survive the reunion. She never rose after the death-birth of her fourth child, the Princess Nadejda, and terminated her unhappy life at the age of thirty.

The real cause of her death was the blow inflicted upon her gentle piety when Ferdinand caused the infant Prince Boris, the heir to the throne, to forswear the faith of his ancestors on both sides at an age when the very meaning of the ceremony was hidden from the child. It was a step which Ferdinand had not even dared to take in his own person. Advantageous as adherence to the Orthodox Church could be to him, his superstitious fears prevented him from the blasphemy he imposed upon a child of three. Let us examine his reasons and excuses for the crime which broke the heart of the unhappy Princess Marie Louise of Parma.