from the Moscow Zoo; and a menagerie of several mountain goats, a dozen white roosters, and a baby bear. The four hundred guests included Foreign Commissar Maxim Litvinov and the Defense Commissar Marshal Kliment Voroshilov; Communist Party luminaries Nikolai Bukharin, Lazar Kaganovich, and Karl Radek; Soviet Marshals Alexander Yegorov, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, and Semyon Budyonny; and the writer Mikhail Bulgakov. The festival lasted until the early hours of the morning. The bear became drunk on champagne given to him by Radek, and in the early morning hours, the zebra finches escaped from the aviary and perched below the ceilings around the house. Bulgakov described the party as "The Spring Ball of the Full Moon" in his novel The Master and Margarita. On October 29, 2010, Ambassador John Beyrle recreated Bullitt's ball with his own Enchanted Ball, dedicated to Bullitt and Bulgakov. Ambassador to France Bullitt was posted to France in October 1936 as ambassador. Fluent in French and an ardent francophile, Bullitt became established in Paris society. He rented a château at Chantilly and owned at least 18,000 bottles of French wine. As a close friend of Roosevelt, with whom he had daily telephone conversations, Bullitt was widely regarded as Roosevelt's personal envoy to France and so was much courted by French politicians. Bullitt was especially close to Léon Blum and Édouard Daladier and had cordial but not friendly relations with Georges Bonnet. Historians have criticized Bullitt for being too influenced by the last person to whom he spoke and for including too much gossip in his dispatches to Washington. On September 4, 1938, in the midst of the great crisis in Europe that was to culminate in the Munich Agreement on September 30, 1938, during the unveiling of a plaque in France honoring Franco-American friendship, Bullitt stated, "France and the United States were united in war and peace." That led to much speculation in the press that if war broke out over Czechoslovakia, the United States would join the war on the Allied side. On September 9, 1938, however, Roosevelt denied any such intention, saying it was "110% wrong that the United States would join a stop Hitler bloc." In 1939, Prime Minister Daladier informed him that French intelligence knew that Alger Hiss in the United States Department of State was working for Soviet intelligence. Bullitt passed the information along to Hiss's superior at the State Department. After the German