I have laid some stress upon the primitive boorishness of the Bulgarians as a race, and upon the essential effeminacy of the Prince who, for lack of a better, was called to the throne of this new principality. The contrast is necessary in order that it may be shown by what means Ferdinand established dominion over a people which has always despised and loathed him, and how he has been able to falsify the confident estimate of the shrewdest observers in Europe, and retain for over a quarter of a century a position for which no one would at any time have given a year’s purchase.

The key to Bulgarian character was maintained by the Bulgarians themselves to be simplicity. In Bulgaria there were no inherited titles, no formalities, no niceties of social intercourse. Like many a man who is incapable of refinement and courtesy of manner, the Bulgarians, by exaggerating their defects, produced the impression of blunt honesty and straightforwardness. They prided themselves on their Spartan simplicity, and were for ever talking about it.

Their boastings about their lack of ceremoniousness gave Ferdinand the clue to the weak spot in the Bulgarian character. He knew that the truly simple and unaffected man is not even aware of the virtue of his simplicity; that there can be no such thing as a conscious sincerity in such matters. And Ferdinand, the most artificial product of the Courts of Europe, deliberately chose that his Boeotian subjects should be a foil to his own elegances.

He began, even in his bachelor days, by establishing a Court ruled by the stiffest formality. This ceremony was doubled when he married, just as his civil list was increased from £20,000 to £40,000 a year. In the little city of Sofia, which even now does not boast 100,000 inhabitants, he maintained a household and a state which rivalled that of the Kaiser himself, and far exceeded that of any other reigning House of Europe.

His exits and entries were preceded by a band of gorgeously uniformed attendants, who backed before him waving wands of glittering whiteness. Court etiquette of an exacting severity was devised and scrupulously exacted. The Bulgarians derided this ceremony openly and on every occasion. But they conformed to it.

Really they were deeply impressed.

Ferdinand contrived a number of orders with brilliant decorations; they had had nothing of the kind in Bulgaria before his coming. Hardly a year passed but he added a new order to the list, and conferred on his toadies the glittering decoration it carried. The simple Bulgarians mocked at these orders, and made endless jokes about them. But there was keen competition for the decorations, and no respectable Sofiete can afford to be without one. Moreover, no decorated Bulgarian ever fails to wear the little button which marks him as decorated properly and jewelled in every hole.

A few of the titles of the courtiers surrounding Ferdinand may be specified, in order to show how elaborate is the state maintained among this simple peasant people. We have the Chancellor of Bulgarian Orders, the Chief of the Secret Cabinet, and two Secretaries, the Grand-Almoner of the Prince of Tirnovo, the Court Marshal, the Major-Domo, the Director of the Civil List, the Master of Ceremonies, the Court Physician, the Master of the Horse, the Inspector of Cavalry, the AttachÉ to the Queen, Mistress of the Robes, Court Poetess, Grand Mistress of the Court, Commandant of the Palace, and such a host of attachÉs and aides-de-camp as was never dreamt of outside a German Court of the eighteenth century.

All this monstrous ceremony served a double purpose with Ferdinand. It impressed the Bulgarians, who could not themselves go the pace, but had the secret snobbish admiration for such things always found among people who profess to regard simplicity as the chief among virtues. It further gave him a reason for taking offence at breaches of Court etiquette, and allowed him to penalize people against whom he could furbish up no other complaint.

Thus Stambuloff was continually infringing the rules of the Court. The Prime Minister, who had enjoyed a large income as the first advocate in Bulgaria, drew from his grateful country the salary of £500 for controlling its destinies in the teeth of an ungrateful Prince and an inappreciative people. To him the formal Court and the sinful waste it involved was really a source of offence. His open disregard for the childish forms it was sought to impose upon him was soon made a source of offence by the King, and even by the meek little Princess Marie Louise.

The effect of this regal extravagance was felt not only in Sofia itself, but throughout Bulgaria. Ferdinand was pleased to travel widely in his principality, and with some considerable elaboration of ceremony. The little municipalities he honoured with his visits had to prepare a ruinous hospitality in advance. A visit from the Prince beggared a community and left it bankrupt for years. Ferdinand ate up little villages like a locust, and earned the deep detestation of the impoverished peasants.

But he impressed them at the same time. And so he gained his object, he established a moral ascendency over the boors, who professed an exaggerated simplicity, and bowed down before ceremonies which made them look ridiculous, and extravagances which impoverished them.

The needs of the country, when Ferdinand accepted the throne, were many and essential. Roads and railways had to be built to develop the nascent agricultural industry which has been the mainstay of Bulgarian national life. The work was taken in hand by Stambuloff, whose plans for the progress of the country, even more than his foreign policy, reveal him as the statesman that his admirers have always proclaimed him. His policy of internal development entailed heavy taxation, under which the country groaned, and which earned him, more than anything else, the title of Tyrant, which Ferdinand thrust upon him.

With his fall the policy of internal development was brought to a standstill, but the taxation continued. Ferdinand employed much of the money in the creation of a capital city worthy of such a Prince and such a Court. He set about the creation of a new Sofia, taking as his motto “Expense is no object.” A modern city was run up with a celerity and elaboration that reminded visitors of the creation of Johannesburg.

M. Alexandre Hepp, the enthusiastic French biographer of Ferdinand, almost exhausts his enthusiasm in recounting the marvels of this recreation of an old city. “It seems like a new city imposed upon one already renewed,” he writes. “Every time I visit it I find something added—a monument, a museum, a park, a government office, a bank, an hotel, a factory, a theatre, or a school. New boulevards and streets, wide, well-paved, planted with trees, lined with kiosques, cross and re-cross. Lions and eagles ornament the new bridges. Electricity flares, the tramcars roar, motor-cars dash about. Near the statue to the Czar Liberator, designed by Zocchi, rears the finished structure of the great cathedral Newski, built at a cost of £1,000,000 raised by public subscription. Great markets are rising from their foundations.” And so on.

All this work was done under the personal supervision of Ferdinand himself. “Behind a corner window of the palace,” writes Mr. John Macdonald, who has produced an English biography of Czar Ferdinand, which only falls short in enthusiasm of the ecstasies of M. Hepp, “overlooking the highway, is the Czar’s private study, where he often works till the first hour or two of the morning. Piles of street plans, of monumental drawings, of designs for the splendid park and gardens, with their new palace, have been examined behind that corner window.”

The sophistication of the Bulgarians having been begun by the creation of this fine city in the midst of the gloomy plains of Bulgaria, Ferdinand continued it by the creation of a powerful military caste.

The dominant note of Sofia is military; there are gay uniforms at every turn. “With their great grey cloaks in the Russian style,” writes M. Hepp, “their white helmets and immaculate gloves, or buckled in their long frogged tunics, with their swords swinging by silken sabretaches, the officers present a fine appearance. They swarm at the new Army Club and at the restaurant of the Red Crab.”

The new Sofia, too, has produced a citizen class which already disdains the peasant simplicity which was the hall-mark of the Bulgarian nation in the time of Stambuloff. They affect fine manners and wit, they try to smile where the old-time Bulgar was a gloomy churl. These parvenu niceties are ostentatious, and sit but ill upon people to whom they are far from natural; they are accompanied by much chatter about art, for Sofia has already produced its clan of “intellectuals.”

But Ferdinand has maintained his distance with the new Bulgarians as with the old. To be hooted at the theatre by a mob of students is no rare experience with him; it drives every vestige of colour from his flabby cheeks. But he will not stoop to conciliate, even in Sofia. His predecessor was a frank young man, who made himself adored by the Bulgarians by meeting them openly and making their life his own. He won love, but no semblance of respect.

Warned by the experience and the fate of Alexander, Ferdinand has always continued to treat every Bulgarian with the utmost reticence. For them there are no confidences; none of the graces of the Fat Charmer are expended upon winning the hearts of Bulgarians. He prefers to be detested, to be feared, to excite a puzzled antipathy.

And there is the secret of the long reign of a Prince over whom the shadow of assassination and the dread of deposition have floated ever since his first appearance in Sofia. The Bulgarians despise what they understand, they have a contempt for those who stoop to please them. They keep a regard for Ferdinand because he treats them as an inferior race; in their heart of hearts they are proud to be ruled by this fine product of two races who, in the words of one of their own writers, “combines German steadiness with French dash.”

A nobler race would have sent Ferdinand packing long ago; he knew the measure of their boorishness, and turned it to his own account with a craft that cannot be denied him. And so Ferdinand has escaped assassination and deposition for more than a quarter of a century.

What ambitions he has begotten, and what schemes he has launched in that period, we shall now see.