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.