by James Prosek
After an hour of fishing we’d caught nothing so we left to be at the exhibition early—it was the first morning that it was open to the public.
Pierre spent the morning trying to sell exotic bird skins to Dutch fly tiers who used the feathers to make salmon flies. “We don’t need parrots and blue chatterers,” one said.
“How about these bustard feathers,” Pierre offered.
“They are no good to us without the matching feather from the opposite wing.”
“Five thousand francs for all of them then,” Pierre said.
“You are asking too much, Pierre,” one responded. “Your birds are not in very good shape.” They turned the birds over and over in their hands and folded the skins to expose the feathers and show how sparse they were. “I would take all of the skins for a thousand francs and even that I think is a lot.”
“One thousand francs?” Pierre gasped, tucking his chin in close to his neck and lifting his shoulders, trying to sound insulted. “They’re worth more than that; I could get minimum three thousand and that would be a great price.”
François, in the meantime, was standing amid his art wearing his green ostrich leather vest, his pipe between his teeth, and a glass of white wine in his hand. He stood beside the only other artist selling art there, a beautiful woman named Marie-Annick who did lovely pastels of fish.
“Did you catch anything this morning, James?” François asked me.
“No, not a bite.”
“I love fishing in the Seine but only in the summer,” François shared. “I never catch fish with Pierre this time of year.”
Fishermen walked by the art mounted on stands and hanging on the walls, but only François’s friends stopped to look for very long. “They’re not interested in art,” said Marie-Annick. François poured her a glass of wine.
“It’s true,” François confirmed, opening another bottle. “They’re only interested in the latest technology in rods and reels. They’ve lost their purpose; they’ve become too removed from real fishing. I love fly-fishing, but they should try bait once in a while. It’s more tactile.” He took out a pouch, stuffed his pipe, and looked vacantly at the room, pretending that he hadn’t just made a philosophical statement or was even capable of making one.
I left François and Marie-Annick briefly to look at a sculpture he had done of a big silure. Staring into its mouth, which was wide enough to accommodate a dinner platter, I began to enact the ritual in my mind of catching one, as prehistoric men once made drawings of the hunt and their prey on the walls of caves the day before leaving to kill.
“The fishing should be good tomorrow,” Pierre commented, stopping by to share a glass of wine. “It’s raining right now. The river must be rising, and the strong current will force the bream to move into the eddy.” He drank his wine. “The big silure will follow. When the bream are in thick, there are so many you can’t bring a lure through the water without snagging one. The silure get in a frenzy. They herd the bream and sometimes push them to the surface, where they stun them with their giant tails and eat them.” Pierre saw in my excited glance that his enthusiasm had been successfully contagious. “We’ll fish every morning until we get one,” he assured me.
The next morning I walked to Ile Saint-Louis alone to go fishing, and passed only two people on the way: green-uniformed workers picking up garbage in front of Notre-Dame. Pierre came on his bicycle an hour later. The bells on the cathedral echoed off the river.
I was leaning against a black lamppost when I got a tug on my lure, but all that I reeled in was my lure with silvery fish scales stuck to the hook. “The bream are in,” I heard Pierre say to himself. “The silure should be too.” But they did not come to my lure that morning.
“Tomorrow we will get serious,” Pierre promised.
At the expo that day, the final day of the show, I was consumed by François’s sculpture of the salmon, le grand bécard vainqueur. It assured its viewer that the fish was a worthy adversary.
After eating lunch, Pierre and I walked in the rain to a fish market on rue Mazarin to buy mackerel and squid for silure bait.
“When I decide to do something, I do it seriously,” Pierre said.
That night we prepared all the gear—six rods, hooks and weights, folding chairs, an umbrella, and wading boots—and stowed it in Pierre’s van.
“Don’t you want to refrigerate that?” I asked Pierre as he loaded the mackerel and squid into a canvas bag.
“No,” he replied, “I want it to stink.”
By seven the next morning we were on Ile Saint-Louis. By seven-thirty all six lines were rigged and set in the water.
At that hour in February it was still dark; the lampposts were lit and the city was quiet. A light drizzle fell on my face as I stretched out on a marble bench and closed my eyes. After a few minutes I lifted my head to see if Pierre was still there. I looked around, and in my half-awake and half-asleep state, the current of the river going by the island gave the illusion that I was aboard a moving ship. I also had the sensation that the ship was sinking, because the river was almost visibly rising from seven days of on-and-off rain.
Near sunrise, Pierre picked up one of the rods and jigged for zander. On the second cast, he retrieved the lure with a fish scale—slightly oblong with a mother-of-pearl brilliance—stuck on the hook. “Bream!” he exclaimed prophetically. “It’s a good sign for silure.”
At this pronouncement, I stared at the lines with new hope, which lasted for about five minutes. My eyes were averted to traffic on the voie Georges Pompidou—the morning migration of Parisians to the west side of the city.
When there was enough light to read by, Pierre pulled out a day-old copy of Le Monde. He read for two minutes, and then looked up at the lines. “Shit!” he yelled. “Where are the silure? We have done everything right here, and the conditions are perfect. If the rain keeps up they will have to close the expressway. Look, it’ll be just a couple feet before it’s underwater!” He walked over to our bait supply and, chopping several mackerel in pieces, started chumming the eddy. “Well, at least we are not stuck in traffic,” he conceded, his bloodied hands throwing chunks of fish into the river.
“Shi-it, where are the silure?”
Several minutes passed.
Pierre laughed as he looked toward the right bank. “There is one now.” He pointed to a long barge on the cabin of which was printed in block letters, Le Silure. It was one of two sanitation barges for the city of Paris that clean the dog feces off the quays and scoop up floating debris, named after the bottom-feeding omnivore we were in pursuit of.
As the morning grew brighter, joggers ran by us around the tip of the island. People walked their dogs on leashes. The dogs sniffed our bait and tangled their feet in our lines. Shortly, the sanitation barge moored to the island with a large metal ring. A man in a green suit jumped out and began to hose down the cobbles. The bells at Notre-Dame and other nearby churches sounded nine-thirty.
MEANWHILE IN ROUEN—MONET AND THE FISH IN HIS LILY POND
When I next talked to Yannid in Rouen she had just finished stitching a man who was hemorrhaging badly after a car accident. The medical students practiced on cases that were more or less terminal. “He died underneath me,” Yannid lamented. “That’s the first time that happened.”
I had returned to Rouen to await the spring and to be with Yannid.
Every day that went by I noticed the sun was stronger, and the tips of the willow branches were greening. The early leaves on the chestnut trees along the river spread from the branches in formations resembling the soft paws of a pouncing snow cat. I told myself that I would not let the emergence of spring pass without watching it closely.
I spent many mild mornings by the river reading or drawing in my sketchbook. Sometimes I was caught in a brief downpour, only to return to the apartment wet. Yannid would see my book warped from the rain and ask why I had not sought refuge under the bridge by the river. I never had a good answer.
> Two weeks into April, Yannid kept her promise to show me the Norman countryside in spring. We packed weekend bags and drove to her aunt’s house, a mansion near Etrépagny. Her aunt, who lived alone, was away and had left us the key to the house with instructions to feed her dog and water the garden.
When we arrived at the large redbrick home, Yannid took me inside and led me upstairs to a guest room on the third floor where she used to stay in summer as a girl. After a time lying in the bed and then napping with the window open, we decided to put aside serious talk about the future and take a walk.
Yannid led me to her aunt’s garden, where she took off her shoes and walked barefoot on the soil between rows of gooseberries. I thought then, just by the way she stood there, that Yannid would not mind very much when I left France to continue on my trip.
That night for dinner we cooked a duck marinated in raspberry wine. Neither of us ate very much, though we managed to share two bottles of good Bordeaux from her aunt’s cellar. After the wine, we strolled outside in the dark under a nearly full moon. Standing at the edge of the garden again, Yannid kissed me. We returned to the house holding hands and reaffirmed our affection for each other in the guest room on the third floor.
The next morning Yannid rose early and collected brown eggs from the chicken coop by the garden. She cooked a large omelette and we ate heartily without saying much.
After breakfast we drove to Giverny to see the house and garden of the painter Claude Monet. The day was warm and held fragrances in the air. Yannid stopped to smell a blossom on our walk through the garden to Monet’s pond of water lilies.
The pond, we discovered, was fed by a channel from a cold spring-fed trout stream. Yannid sat by the stream to enjoy its refreshing coolness and I sat next to her. She leaned over and kissed me. We had talked little that day so it surprised me when she spoke.
“Hey, there’s a fish down there,” she said, glancing into the water.
“Where?” I asked, for I couldn’t see it at first.
“Below us there.”
“You’re right,” I said, and took Yannid’s hand and kissed it. “It’s a trout.”
I nestled my face in the crook of her neck and thought about driving back to Rouen for my rod, but it was a nice relief just to watch the trout and not have to catch it.
“It’s nice just to watch it,” Yannid noted.
“I was thinking the same thing,” I agreed. We walked back through the garden to see Monet’s house.
It was clear from looking at his paintings, especially his late work, that Monet saw infinite possibilities in depicting the way that water abstracted the willows and the sky and wove all their colors into its reflections. The walls of his home were hung almost exclusively with Japanese prints (many by Hiroshige), almost all of which depicted water, fish, or fishermen.
“Why didn’t he paint the fish?” I asked Yannid later that day as we stared at several large carp in the lily pond.
“Only you would think of that,” Yannid said. “Maybe he had enough to keep him busy on the surface. He knew he had to decide what to paint, and then master what he chose.”
On the way back to her aunt’s home, Yannid and I stopped at a fish market in Etrepagny and bought some fresh cod and squid.
When we arrived at the house Yannid opened a bottle of muscadet that had been chilling in the fridge. There was a cool musty flavor to the tall kitchen, which made Yannid’s skin feel cool on my hand. I kissed her hand and held it between mine.
I sautéed the squid in olive oil with lots of garlic and we baked the cod in the oven with fresh vegetables. Yannid brought the wine out on the porch, where we had set a small round table with forks and plates and our meal. I lit a candle.
“What are you going to do when you leave France?” Yannid asked. I could see that she was getting sad and I heard a touch of vibrato in her voice. “I’m trying to be rational about this.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I’m lonely, you know. You’re leaving this summer, and I want you to be happy and free. But I don’t want you to go.”
I kissed her cold cheek, now wet with tears. A cool breeze blew from the direction of the garden. “Let’s clean up and go to bed,” she said.
AN EXHIBITION OF FISH
One among Pierre’s circle of fishing friends was an elderly gentleman named André Schoeller. André always wore a tie, even when he fished, and never passed up an opportunity to show his talents as a raconteur. He shared memories of being a boy in Paris during the Nazi occupation, hinted at his relationship as a young man with the singer Edith Piaf and his friendship with Picasso, spoke of the record pike he had taken in his pond in Normandy, and also of the health of the Seine.
An art dealer for the better part of his life, André was in the midst of organizing an exhibition of paintings and sculptures of fish and fishing scenes done by painters, living and dead, who fished. To Schoeller, the crowning jewel of artists who had rendered trout on canvas was the French realist Gustave Courbet. He wanted badly to borrow Courbet’s painting La Truite from the Musée d’Orsay to be the cornerstone of the exhibition, but even with his connections this was difficult. In the event that he could not borrow the painting, he had arranged for the next best thing, to hold the exhibition nearby the museum, on 13, quai de Conti, at the Galerie Larock-Granoff.
Pierre Larock, André’s personal friend who owned the gallery, was famous for having inherited the largest private collection of Monet paintings from his aunt Katya, Monet’s niece. Like Schoeller, Larock was a fisherman, and no doubt the idea for the exhibition took form over a lunch at their private pike-fishing pond in Normandy. Both François and Marie-Annick, whom I had previously met, were to be included in the exhibition as living artists, and I was asked to participate as well; dead artists included were Rebeyrolle, Messagier, and Miró, among others. The exhibition was arranged and a date for the opening was set.
In the meantime I had a trip planned to eastern France to visit and fish for trout with a friend of Pierre’s, Philippe Boisson. I had been told that the trout—locally known as the truite zébrée—and the streams there were exquisite, especially the river Loue near the Swiss border where Philippe lived.
PHILIPPE BOISSON AND LIFE IN CHENECEY-BUILLON
Philippe picked me up at the train station in Besançon, and we drove together in his red diesel Citroën to his apartment in the village of Chenecey-Buillon. He lived there with his young wife-to-be, Katy, on the second floor of an old stone farmhouse within earshot of the currents of the river Loue, where he had grown up fly-fishing.
Katy was petite, good humored, and pretty, and Philippe was a handsome left-handed fly fisher with a bump on his nose; as a couple they radiated contentedness and good health. She was a medical student, like Yannid, but found time to fish with Philippe between rounds at the hospital in Besançon.
There was not much to see in Chenecey-Buillon if you weren’t interested in fishing or natural beauty. Besides a stone bridge, a bakery, a small inn with a bar, and a church, the village was an open meadow with red poppies. To those with rapid temperaments, a life there could be considered dull, but I doubted that the word had ever entered Philippe’s mind.
His friends hung out at the boardinghouse and bar by the river. The proprietor was tall, wore a full black mustache, and knew everyone’s name, even mine, shortly. Before I had spoken to him, he greeted us at the table with two beers on his tray.
“Show him the trout,” the proprietor called proudly. When we had finished our beers, Philippe walked me to the dining room in the inn, where the skin mount of a large brown trout was displayed over the mantel of a hearth. The trout was sixteen pounds, Philippe explained, pointing out its enormous head and formidable teeth. It was different from any other trout I’d seen, striped at intervals with dark vertical bands. “The locals,” he explained, “call this la truite zébrée. This fish was hooked and landed by my best friend, Norbert—the third largest ever taken in France on the fly. He caught it on a size-sixteen phe
asant-tail nymph in August when the river was low and clear, on line with a breaking strength of only two and a half pounds.” Like few other places in the world—Livingston, Montana, or Stockbridge, England—a skilled fly fisherman in Chenecey-Buillon was respected as nothing short of a virtuoso.
The afternoon I arrived, Philippe gave me his lucky fishing hat to wear. We drove with Katy on a dirt road through a large farm along the river, until we came to an emerald pool, the surface dimpled with the rises of feeding trout. Katy was on the water immediately, downstream of us, making long graceful casts across the pool.
As I prepared to fish, Philippe kindly affirmed that the flies in my boxes were useless and handed me the precise fly for the occasion. I wondered some about his tackle too, especially the enormous net that hung over his shoulder, nearly two and a half feet wide. Then I remembered the big trout at the boardinghouse. I began to cast and he gave instructions in French.
“You must have no drag on the fly,” Philippe advised, rubbing the bridge of his nose, “and then maybe, maybe, the trout will take.”
I tried several casts to a rising fish at the tail of a pool, trying to let the fly drift as if it were a natural insect free of my line. On every cast my fly dragged before it reached the fish. “It’s been a long winter,” I yelled to Philippe over the sound of running water, and gave up, frustrated.
Philippe took my place in the river, made ten casts from the same spot, and hooked six trout. He landed only one because of his haste to show me what the trout in his river looked like. He held it out for me to see. It was true, the trout had the zebra stripes like he had said. “It’s your turn, James,” Philippe said, handing me his rod.
“Approach the fish slowly and get as close as you can before casting.” As the sun was setting over the field of foot-high corn, I hooked my first zébrée.
I learned that the meaning of fishing for Philippe was waiting and observing.