How Could I have been so Grossly Oblivious?

It was in the not-so-summer of Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death that I first met Marcel and when he loaned me his copy of Albert Camus’ The Plague.  I’ve read through that book several times over the years and it has occurred to me that there were several things about that first encounter that should have registered as more than slightly odd.  They didn’t. Not then.  But I’ve had a long time to think about it now and I’ve begun to wonder.

The first thing that I should have noticed is that that year without a summer, when Mary Shelly was writing about her modern Prometheus and volcano affected weather patterns were frightening and perplexing people around the globe, was almost one hundred years before that great existentialist was born and one hundred and thirty one years before he wrote that particular novel.  How was it that Marcel could have been carrying around a tattered paperback edition over a century before its possible existence?

The second thing that didn’t immediately occur to me, though you will think that it should have been obvious , was that Marcel was, in fact, a monkey.  He wore a bright red tarboosh and vest with gold trim and tassels and spoke with an outrageous French accent, but still, he was a monkey.  Specifically he was a Red-Eared Guenon.

How could I have been so grossly oblivious?