Yet it is difficult to imagine any use for what appears to be the nearest thing to a manly accomplishment he possesses. Unless he wants to run away from somewhere, his engine driving is hardly likely to be of any benefit to himself or anyone else.
It is a futile accomplishment, as nearly all his occupations and amusements are futile. Compared with such a king as our own, who does an immense amount of hard, useful work, in an unassuming way; or even with the Kaiser, who makes a lot of fuss, but certainly gets a good deal done, this Ferdinand is surely a make-believe monarch.
He sits in his thug-proof den, surrounded by his photographs and his absurd silver model of a railway truck and other trumpery, and allows it to be understood that his labours of State keep him up to all hours of the morning. But the net result of his labours is a new fête dress for himself, some fault-finding with the garden plans of a landscape expert, or something equally useless.
With the exception of the expensive capital, Bulgaria remains as Stambuloff left it. He claims, this shoddy Czar, that he has worked unremittingly to improve a semi-barbarous kingdom; while he has been engaged in the most trifling and useless occupations. Beyond ministering to his own inordinate vanity, and scheming darkly to some one else’s disadvantage, all his occupations are as childishly futile as those I have described.
FERDINAND THE FRENCHMAN
“It is a Prince entirely French, by tradition, by instinct, by aspiration, and by talent who was the founder of Bulgaria, and is to-day its King.”—M. Alexandre Hepp.
CHAPTER XVI
FERDINAND THE FRENCHMAN
One of the lessons that Great Britain has been compelled to learn in the last two years is that its respected citizen, Mr. Black, purveyor of meat, is in reality none other than that dangerous alien Herr Schwartz, the maker of German sausages. Our gallant allies of France have been apt to wonder at the laggard hesitation of us British in learning and applying this lesson. Yet when the history of the great war comes to be written frankly and fully, it may well be revealed that one of the hardest knocks delivered to the allied cause was due to the incurably optimistic idea prevailing among Frenchmen in the highest places that Ferdinand Saxe-Coburg Cohen was really Ferdinand de Bourbon.