FERDINAND AND THE BULGARIANS
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 Bœotian 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.
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FERDINAND THE AMBITIOUS
“_I drink to Czar Ferdinand, the heir to Constantine._”—SOME FUDDLED
YANKEE SCRIBE.
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