The Duke of Parma made one condition of importance when giving his consent to the wedding. He insisted that the children of the marriage should be baptized into the Catholic Church, and should be brought up in that faith. Ferdinand himself was a Catholic, if he was anything at all, and the condition was therefore the more reasonable. But the official religion of Bulgaria is, of course, the Orthodox Church, and the masses are bigoted in their adherence to that faith. The real difficulty lay in an article of the Bulgarian Constitution that provided that the heir to the throne must be baptized according to the rites of the Orthodox Church. This difficulty was met by Stambuloff in his own downright fashion. He annulled it, to the horror of the Bulgarian Churchmen, and made the marriage possible. The Princess won the hearts of her new subjects from the very moment of her arrival in Bulgaria. She had the sympathetic notion to enter the Principality attired in the costume of an ordinary Bulgarian woman, and it became her girlish beauty charmingly. Her frank unaffected interest in all she saw, her gracious acceptance of the little gifts, and the somewhat boorish homage paid her on her journey, gave her a reputation that preceded her to Sofia. She retained the instant popularity she won till the day of her death six years later. She was as much loved in Bulgaria as Ferdinand was detested. The treatment accorded her by her husband, almost from the day of her wedding, was well calculated to shrivel such a gentle soul, and to extinguish the spark of life in so frail a frame. The absurd formality of his Court imposed upon her tasks that wearied her almost to unconsciousness. She had nothing in common with her crafty, ambitious husband, who had taken her into a nightmare land where assassination and worse horrors lurked perpetually in the dark corners of the magnificent palaces she occupied. Four children she bore him in six years. Once she left him, as a protest against the shameless breach of the conditions under which she consented to wed him. During that period of separation her friends and relatives made public details of the torture of her married life that left Ferdinand’s callous nature exposed to the full gaze of the world. It was told how, in order to punish one of her favourite Court ladies for some indiscretion of speech, Ferdinand rose to his feet, and remained standing for over an hour. This imposed a standing posture upon the whole of the Court, including the Princess, who had but lately become a mother. The whole Court looked on in horror as this fragile flower grew whiter and whiter in her robes of State, maintaining herself in an upright position with the acme of physical effort.