"MONSIEUR BUMBO"
In
the salon of Mme de Cambremer there was a waiter who, seeing my usual
bored-looking attitude, recruited me to help him in his mission. It was not
about carrying trays with canapés and glasses of champaigne, of course. Because
the waiter was not really a waiter. He was a monkey keeper. And you may wonder:
what was a monkey keeper doing in Mme de Cambremer’s salon? Or
maybe it was the other way around: Had Mme de Cambremer moved her salon to the monkey
enclosure of the Ménagerie du Jardin des
Plantes? Well, to answer that question we must go back several months, when
a chimpanzee named Bumbo managed to escape from Prospect Park zoo in New York by
the simple procedure of smacking his keeper and making a picklock with his
glasses. The keeper followed Bumbo's trail to a pier in Chelsea where the
transatlantic SS Paris had just set sail. Assuming that Bumbo had embarked as a
stowaway, the keeper embarked on the next ship bound for Le Havre. He assumed
that one of the eccentric and snobbish passengers of the SS Paris would have
run into Bumbo during the Atlantic voyage and adopted him as a pet. So once in Paris
he enrolled in a temporary hiring agency of waiters for parisian high society’s
parties, a job that would allow him to sharpen his hearing on
the lookout for any information about the chimpanzee. To his surprise, while he
was exercising his cover of waiter, he recognized Bumbo among a row of guests
at a reception in the palais de l'Elysée.
The chimpanzee was wearing evening dress, top hat and monocle, and was shaking
hands with the President of the Republic. Further investigations revealed to
the keeper that Bumbo had somehow managed to sneak into the jet set imitating
the arrogant behavior of its members. In short, I accepted the challenge and,
for weeks, toured all the Paris’s salons in search of the chimpanzee. In the
end, I had five candidates who fitted the profile. Hence, the identification was
not an easy task. Only when I challenged the five of them to climb a tree did
the monkey unmask himself.
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