His travels abroad are marvels of precaution. Ask the Scotland Yard men, whose duty it is to look after foreign potentates in this country, who is the fussiest and most timid man they ever encountered, and an unanimous vote will be cast for the Czar of Shoddy. In Paris he and his suite are even more solicitous; their precautions, as I have once before related, spoiled the pleasure of a Grand Prix crowd at Longchamps, when the Czar of Bulgaria condescended to visit that former scene of gaiety and gambling.
In Austria he is little better, and in Germany he is more fidgetty than ever. But it is when he has visited Russia that his precautions become portentous to the very degree of the ludicrous. He fancies, this scion of the Bourbons, that the conspirators will call in the aid of science and slay him with microbes. The very word disease makes him blench and fly for safety.
Thus on the journey from Sofia to Petrograd, in 1909, he was informed that the Grand Duke Nicholas had been deputed to meet and welcome him, but would be compelled to see less of him than he would like, because his nephew was down with scarlet fever, and although uncle and nephew were not residing together, the Grand Duke visited him regularly.
Ferdinand meditated anxiously over this ominous message, and then requested as a great favour that some other Grand Duke, further removed from the infectious ills to which even royalties are subject, should meet him; whereupon the Grand Duke Constantine was appointed. Then the Czar of Bulgaria was tranquillized, and everything went smoothly for a time.
But after a day or two spent in the Russian capital Ferdinand was shocked to learn that, whereas the nephew of the Grand Duke Nicholas was suffering from scarlet fever in another house, the Grand Duke Constantine’s own children, who lived with him under the same roof, were suffering from genuine diphtheria, which everybody knows is far more malignant.
In the course of the next day Ferdinand was suffering from an imaginary pain in the throat, and made such a fuss about it that the whole Russian Court was convulsed with merriment. He sought the first excuse for returning to Sofia, and only breathed freely when safe again under the care of his trusted Court physician.
Ferdinand ought to be inured to threats of assassination, for not a week passes but he gets threatening letters by the post. But the receipt of a bottle labelled “typhus bacilli” never fails to make him livid with fear. The sight of men cleaning off from the palace walls drawings of himself suffering hideous deaths—Ferdinand is easy to draw, and it is a favourite students’ amusement—always sets him chattering with rage.
But there are traits in his character which overrule this fear of assassination, strong as it is within him, and cause him to hang on to his threatened throne, though he does so in fear and trembling. What those characteristics are will presently be made plain; meanwhile, it will be well to consider what country it is that he rules, where the leading statesman can predict successfully the manner and place of his own assassination without causing any surprise.
WHO ARE THE BULGARIANS?