Russia saw it as the triumph of the Slav race. France saw the Latin idea conquering Teuton “kultur.” Great Britain dreamed of the victory of Christianity over the heathen. And all the time Ferdinand stood by his throne at Euxinograd, and dreamed and schemed and plotted. Races and creeds alike were of no account to Ferdinand, the man of no race who had committed apostasy in the person of his own infant son. He, the fop, the scented darling of French drawing-rooms, saw himself the heir to Constantine, the successful imitator of the great Bulgarian Czars Samuel and Simeon. They were stopped only at the walls of Constantinople; but Ferdinand did not plan to stop there.
That insane ambition governed every step he has taken for fifteen years. It brought him and Bulgaria perilously near to annihilation in the Balkan wars. It made treaties for him the veriest scraps of paper. It moulded his conduct and dictated his alliances.
How he has conducted the Bulgarian people along the path which leads away from their racial ties as well as from the obligations imposed upon them by their indebtedness for their very existence as a nation will shortly be told.
But first it will be interesting to know something more of the man who is obsessed by this wild ambition, always unattainable, but rendered doubly unattainable now by the deeds of men more ambitious, more unscrupulous, and a hundred times more powerful than he.
FERDINAND THE FUTILE
“The Prince is undoubtedly a clever man; but he wastes his cleverness on petty matters.”—Stambuloff.
CHAPTER XV
FERDINAND THE FUTILE
The tradition that great monarchs are many-sided men has no warmer adherent than Ferdinand of Bulgaria, who is ever ready to exemplify it in his own person. To those who are familiar with his pursuits and amusements, his method of spending his days constitutes a most cruel parody upon the thousand different avocations of his “glorious ally” the Kaiser. But the Kaiser, as I have had occasion to show elsewhere, is in many respects a remarkable and successful man, who makes practical use of his wide store of information. Ferdinand’s alleged serious occupations are a daily round of sheer futilities.