Ferdinand had been elected to fill the shoes of a prince who had been kidnapped for his virtues and abilities. The dashing Alexander of Battenberg is a popular hero of his people, a warrior Prince whom the rough Bulgarian peasants could understand and love. There comes to take his place a finicking, fine gentleman with an eyeglass in his eye, who shows up in the capital for the first time in a general’s uniform, but riding in a carriage. As a matter of fact, he was in such a state of nervous terror that it would not have been safe to let him mount a horse. And what a country for such an exquisite to rule! Bulgaria in 1915 is bad enough, but words fail to paint the primitive savagery of the country in 1887. Sofia, the capital, was little more than a glorified village, and the new Prince bumped hideously over the ruts in the streets as his carriage passed to the palace. Nearly twenty years later, one of the most tactful great ladies of Europe, wishing to pay Ferdinand a compliment on the great improvement wrought in his capital since his accession, said sweetly: “I do love Sofia, the railway makes it so easy to run over to Vienna for a little gaiety.” But even that reason for leaving Sofia did not exist when this cuckoo Prince first drove down its main street. Bulgarian was one of the few languages his mother had not added to his list of accomplishments, and his hope that his perfect French would carry him through triumphantly was only partly justified. He found many of the most important men of State knew no language but their own, and these he failed to comprehend as completely as they him. The motley races of this Principality were of all colours and creeds. Bulgars, Serbians, gipsies, Turks, Circassians, Jews, Armenians, Tartars, Russians, Rumanians, Albanians, then as now, were all huddled together cheek by jowl. They were all as strange to him as would have been a race of Maoris. But if he felt any misgivings about his new rôle in life he did not display them. Indeed, he was ready with a cant explanation of his acceptance of the responsibility, and of his flight from Vienna in an ignoble guise. “I did not seek the Bulgarian crown. It was offered to me with the assurance that I could do much good in the country. The mission was a noble one, and I accepted it.” His idea of Royalty was centred in the stateliest pageants of the most formal Courts of Europe. He had had a wide experience of Courts, and knew exactly the extreme of outward show that was employed to hedge the greatest monarchs of Christendom. He established a ceremonial that outdid them all. It was Ferdinand’s way of asserting his own importance in a principality where the Prince was treated like an idle and worthless schoolboy.