An Exotic Perfume

He was a tall man with a long, foxy face, a pointed beard, and a nose that drooped on & on. He liked to grow flowers and watch birds. Germany's Wilhelm II detested and respected him: "I cannot stand Ferdinand but he beats us all for brains." Russia's peace-loving Leo Tolstoy came closer to the world's opinion when, as a curtain line in his play Plody Prosveshcheniya (The Fruits of Enlightenment), he had a valet pick up a newspaper with the remark: "Well well, let us see what our Ferdinand is up to now."

It was intrigue, inspired by a gypsy prophecy, which helped make Ferdinand Maximilian Karl Leopold Maria of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha Czar of Bulgaria. Before his birth his mother, Princess Clementine of Bourbon-Orleans, daughter of France's Louis Philippe, consulted a gypsy fortune teller who told her that, though she had lived as the daughter of an uncrowned monarch, she would die the mother of a crowned one. Much of the rest of her life was spent shopping for a crown, and training Ferdinand to wear it. As part of that training she placed him in the Austrian hussars, where a regimental commander is said to have told him: "Your Royal Highness had better find himself a throne, for he will never become a hussar."

Ferdinand's chance came in 1887. Stefan Stambolov, Bulgaria's anti-Russian, anti-Turkish "Bismarck," looking around for a new prince, settled on Clementine's Ferdinand. Subsequently, a contemporary account records, Ferdinand, a "handsome, smiling, slender youth, perfectly corseted, lips and cheeks bravely rouged, leaving in his wake an exotic perfume, rode gallantly into Sofia amid the cheers of his devoted people." His confidence in his people's devotion was not unbounded; he kept a pistol on his desk when receiving visitors.

Ferdinand got the support of Russia's Nicholas II, after Stambolov had been conveniently hacked to death by an assassin. He promoted himself from prince to czar, later sealed his own regal fate by choosing Wilhelm's side in World War I. In 1918 he stole out of Sofia, leaving his throne to his son Boris.

Thereafter he lived a quiet, secluded life in Coburg among his flowers, birds, and collection of unset precious stones. At Coburg, last week, 87-year-old Ferdinand of Bulgaria died.

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