THE BROKEN-HEARTED PRINCESS
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.
[Illustration: Princess Marie Louise of Bulgaria]
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.
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AN APOSTATE BY PROXY
“_It is my duty to lay on the altar of the Fatherland the greatest and
heaviest of sacrifices._” —FERDINAND OF BULGARIA.
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