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fiancée.
    â€œShe has a very nice voice,” he remarked, looking straight ahead through his clerical glasses, his wavy matted hair becoming wet under the drizzle. “I talked to her on the phone when I called you the other day. I assume you will return to France often to see her—of course—you have to paint all the beautiful French trouts.” He laughed. “In the east of France we have a very interesting trout we call truite zébrée. This is a very unique fish; it has dark vertical bands on it like a zebra. I will introduce you to Philippe Boisson; he knows the rivers there better than anyone; well, maybe I will go too. The zébrée is the trout that Gustave Courbet painted that hangs in the Orsay Museum down the street on quai Conti. You must go see it.”
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    â€œThe house used to be a bordel, ” Pierre told me as we entered a dark hall over a patterned tile floor and up a small stairs. “As you will see,downstairs there is an exit onto rue Mazet where the men would leave so they would not be seen coming and going from the same door, or the same street.”
    In a large sunlit room on the top floor of Pierre’s apartment, I met Pierre’s wife, Carole. She was preparing lunch for two of their three children, who were screaming as they chased each other around the room. Carole looked at Pierre with one hand on her hip and the other on her cigarette. She was tapping her foot, her apron besplattered with macaroni and cheese. Then she turned to the children. She spoke what seemed to be immaculate French, but with an American accent.
    â€œMarlin! Venice! Regarde-moi! ”
    â€œ Qu’est-ce qu’elle fait? ” cried their father.
    â€œShe should be doing her homework, Pierre.”
    â€œDo your homework, Venice.”
    â€œPapa!”
    I remembered when I saw the paintings on the walls that Nick had told me about Carole being a painter with an unusual subject. The one before me was an oil about a meter square depicting a close-up of an animal’s genitalia, I know not what kind; tender pink flesh resolved to a wrinkled pile of purplish skin. As an organic abstraction it was beautiful, like an O’Keeffe painting, but not flowers.
    Ignoring the chaos about the kitchen, Pierre took me down a narrow stair. Halfway down we encountered his third child, May Fario, a dark-haired girl in adolescent bloom who, like the youngest, Marlin, was named by Pierre for a type of fish ( fario is the subspecies name of a brown trout native to western Europe).
    There were two rooms mysteriously set on half floors off the stairs and then two more on the floor we descended to. The room, unlike the one we’d entered upstairs, was dimly lit. It was wide and fortresslike and the walls were uneven and richly colored, alternating yellow and red. There was only one window, tall and thin in the corner of the room, and a plain metal door that exited onto rue Mazet.
    Ragged and cracking skin mounts of pike and trout, some in terrariums with sprigs of lake weed and logs, were hung about the room, musty and dusty like relics of an abandoned mansion. There were also plaster casts of large zander and carp that Pierre had caught in the Seine, and hanging by chains from the ceiling were giant metal sculptures of horrifying insects with chain-saw wings, enormous steel hooks, oil-can collars, antennas of knife blades, bodies of mammal vertebrae. “You will meet the artist who made these tomorrow night when we set up for the fly-fishing show. He’s a true original. Would you believe he’s a tax inspector and does all this art on the side? You will be astounded by his atelier; it’s a wonder he can make any of this stuff there, it’s hardly large enough to stand up in.”
    I thought my eyes had feasted on every nook of the room until I looked at the ceiling, where Carole had painted a Sistinesque rendition of naked cherubim riding dolphins firing gilt arrows