6.3. The Back Flip
There’s many a slip between the cup and the lips. Relations between France and Germany took a turn for the worse and war broke out between them in 1870.
Napoleon III was vanquished, and his monarchy was gone with the winds. He sought sanctuary in England, where he died in exile.

Baha found himself in an unenviable position. His prospective protector and benefactor was toppled. Baha was not, however, at the end of his resources. In a Volta-face to save his face, Baha turned the tables on Napoleon III. Overnight Baha became “God, the Ever-Forgiving, the Most Merciful, who had sent Jesus Christ to announce his coming”.

Overnight, “the petition of this servant,” which at his own instance “was laid at the foot of the throne of the Monarch of the age,” turned itself into “the Book of God”. “The petition of this servant” was misconceived by “the king of kings” and his “minister”. Baha was not out for a dole. Baha stood for the exaltation of the word.

In a long-winded commentary epistle, intended for Napoleon III, who had already lost his crown and throne, Baha castigated him for having “cast behind his back the Book of God [i.e. the petition of this servant] …. Sent unto thee by Him, who is the All-Mighty, the All-Wise”.

“For what thou hast done,” Baha predicted so to speak, “thy kingdom shall be thrown into confusion, and thine empire shall pass from thine hands, as a punishment for that which thou hast wronged. We see abasement hastening after thee, whilst thou art of the heedless.”

Baha by-passed Count Gobineau, the intermediary between him and Napoleon III, and “We bade a Christian dispatch this tablet, and he informed us that he transmitted both the original and its translation. And, the Almighty, the All-Knowing, hath knowledge of all things.”
“A Christian,” according to Shoghi Effendi, was the French agent in Acre”. “A Christian,” according to Sir Abbas Effendi, in his Kitab-i-Mufawadhat, Cairo, 1928, P.29, was “Kaiser Katafko, the son of the French Consul.”

“A Christian, according to And-al-Husayn Ayati surnamed Awara, in his Kashf-al-Hijab, Vol. I. 6th impression, PP. 59-60, was Kaiser Katafko an Arab Christian businessman [of Acre], who had no connection with the French government. He was conversant in the French language only.”
The text of the last sentence runs as follows “We bade a Christian ..”

« و امر نمودیم یکی از ملاء حضرت روح این لوح را ارسال دارد و او ذکر نمود لوح و ترجمه آنرا ارسال داشتم. العلم عندالله العزیز العلام.

Thus, consigned into oblivious was the good deed of Count Gobineau, who carried and delivered “the petition of this servant”.
Jettisoned overbound was Napoleon III, for whose “shadow of protection” Baha craved. Forgotten were Napoleon III and Count Gobineau, who were “to be commemorated by Baha’s followers throughout the length and breadth of Iran until the day of resurrection.”
In God Passes By, P.225, Shoghi Effendi castigates Napoleon III in the following terms:
“The foremost Monarch of his day in the West, excessively ambitious, inordinately proud, tricky and superficial, who is reported to have contemptuously flung down the tablet [i.e. the petition of this servant] sent to him and found wanting, and whose downfall was explicitly predicted in a subsequent Tablet …”

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