Read Fly-Fishing the 41st for Free Online

in Rouen. Well, it won’t take you long to get here. And keep in mind that in two weeks is the big French fly-fishing exposition, Le Salon de la Pêche à la Mouche. I am organizing it now for the fifth year; you will enjoy this immensely. If you come a few days before the salon you can help me with the setup. You will meet some fantastic fishermen from all over Europe, good guys, from Russia, Iceland, and Holland especially.”
    I pictured Pierre speaking from a dark apartment in downtown Paris surrounded by books with the river nearby and the rain falling. I had only communicated with him by letter, so it was a privilege now, and a bit surreal, to ask a question and get an immediate response. “Can we fish the Seine?” I asked.
    â€œIt is a bit high now, but of course we will fish the Seine. The better fishing is in May and June, but we have an unusual fisherynow off the Ile Saint-Louis. I will tell you all about it when you arrive. We catch big pike and zander and even the occasional sea trout, do you believe it? In downtown Paris. It is an amazing fishery, as you will see.”
    T HE O LD B ROTHEL ON R UE D AUPHINE
    A s it turned out I could not go to Paris immediately because I had planned a trip with Yannid to go skiing in eastern France. But I called Pierre the moment I returned. When he answered the phone, he was breathless with excitement.
    â€œYou must come quickly,” he urged. “We’ve been having fantastic fishing in the Seine. I have never seen it like this before. We’re catching silure, up to thirty kilos. You won’t believe it.”
    Silure, I learned, is a catfishlike fish with a flat head, a wide mouth with six whiskerlike barbels, and a long tadpolelike tail, which it uses to stun its prey. The silure ’s cone-shaped body is designed to eat and digest big things like other fish, small ducks, geese, and garbage on the river bottom. This accounts for its immense size—it is the second largest freshwater fish in Europe after the sturgeon, and specimens have been caught in excess of two hundred pounds (the largest from the Po River in Italy).
    Â 
    What made Paris extraordinary for me was its intimacy with the Seine. At so many points you were drawn to walk beside it, or across it on its diverse bridges, acknowledging it as an artery without which the city’s beauty would pale.
    Pierre’s narrow street, rue Dauphine, was perpendicular to theSeine, an extension of Pont Neuf on the Left Bank not far from Notre-Dame cathedral. The entrance to rue Dauphine from the quai was one of those magical points in Paris where in just several paces you crossed from the majesty of the riverine city to the narrow street of a seemingly smaller town.
    The morning I arrived from Rouen on the train it was drizzling in Paris, and by Pierre’s reports it had been raining for days. Though I was not familiar with the Seine’s normal flows, when I crossed by foot on the pont Neuf, I could see that it was in flood, so high that barges with tall loads could no longer slip under the bridge arches. The water was opaque and yellowish, a combination, I thought, of suspended silt and reflections of the sandstone buildings on either bank. There was no way to see a fish in it—the visibility could not have been more than two inches.
    I walked in a nondescript door at 23, rue Dauphine and up a warped spiral staircase to the third floor, where I approached a red door in a dark corner of the hall. I assumed it was Pierre’s because there were six scales from a giant tarpon nailed to it in a circle. I knocked and heard quick footsteps across a creaking wood floor. The door opened and a man of average height stood in the frame.
    â€œPlease,” he gestured, “enter.”
    He looked like my mental version of a rural apothecary, blue eyes staring at me through elliptical wire-rimmed glasses resting on the bridge of a cheerful gnomish nose. He wore rubber boots, a