THE TRAINING OF A TRAITOR
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.
[Illustration: Ferdinand’s Mother, Princess Clementine, at the age of
82.]
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.
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LEARNING THE ROPES
“_The position is not particularly brilliant, but where is a better one
to be found? I am a reigning Prince_.” —FERDINAND OF BULGARIA.
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