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.
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.