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.