Fly-Fishing the 41st (7 page)

“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.

A
N
E
XHIBITION OF
F
ISH

O
ne 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.

P
HILIPPE
B
OISSON AND
L
IFE
IN
C
HENECEY
-B
UILLON

P
hilippe 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 pheasant-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.

Every morning of my stay with him and Katy, we sat on the terrace in front of the bar overlooking the river. The proprietor would bring us two
cafés.
Philippe unwrapped the paper from his cube of sugar, never taking his eyes off the surface of the river. He continued to watch the currents as he stirred the coffee with his spoon. The proprietor wiped the empty tables of morning dew with a blue towel.

“The fishing is very easy now,” said Philippe, by which he meant as compared to the fishing in August, when the river was low and clear and the trout were fussy. The fishing was not easy for me, though. Philippe used very specialized flies he tied himself and fished with leaders of clear monofilament up to six or seven meters. He stalked the fish with such care that by the time he cast he was sometimes within a rod's length of them.

He was a magician at spotting trout over the light emerald gravel. If he stared long enough into the water it was inevitable that a fish would appear. Fishing with
mouche sèche,
dry fly, and on the surface was of no interest to Philippe, because he was interested in catching only the biggest trout.

“All the big fish, over three kilos, are caught on nymphs,” he declared.

At times when we fished, we waited for trout so long that I thought I could see the sun tanning my arm as we sat in the grass. We mixed the waiting with eating, baguettes and local Franche Comté cheese, and drinking cold
cidre doux.
When the light was not right for spotting fish we even napped, which was nice because the breezes were always fragrant in the Jura and made for pleasant dreaming.

One afternoon, walking Philippe's beat on the Loue, we came across a large sick trout. It was finning in a still, quiet eddy where a healthy trout would never lie. It had white fungus growing over its eyes and was probably blind.

“Don't move,
truite vieille, truite malade,
” Philippe said, wading out to where it held over the gravel. “Old sick trout,” he said, slipping the net underneath him. “He was a seven-pound fish when he was healthy.”

When held in the light, there were vestiges of gold on its broad sides. “Even in this condition it is a good specimen of
zébrée.
You see the stripes? Its
tête énorme,
and the big
nageoires?
It is Courbet's trout.”

 

Philippe took me to Ornans one day to visit the house and studio of the nineteenth-century painter Gustave Courbet.

Courbet was born in the town of Ornans on the Loue, some miles upstream from where Philippe lived. Courbet was a fisherman and through the course of his career painted several oils of the native trout from the river, one of which hangs in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. When I first saw Courbet's
Truite
in the Orsay, I didn't understand Pierre's or André's rapturous descriptions of it—it didn't look like any trout I had ever seen. The fish's colors were washed out, almost silvery, with a faint yellow cast. It had small irregular spots like cracked peppercorns, a black ventral fin as large as a sail, and an enormous and almost grotesque head. Only now, after I had seen a big trout from la Loue, could I appreciate Courbet's painting; it was true.

The centuries-old stone homes in Ornans seemed to grow from the river, their foundations in the currents, their terraces spilling over the river and hung with
jardinière.
Swallows dipped about and the occasional falcon could be seen chasing stoneflies from their perches on area cliffs. One of these homes, the one with the faded
block letters
BRASSERIE
on its side, had once been the studio of Courbet.

The artist was a quiet hero; you didn't see the crowds here at Ornans that you did at Monet's home in Giverny. We walked down a narrow cobble street, rue Maison Courbet, to Courbet's door.

The three-story house was spacious; we walked up and down the creaky steps looking at several paintings. I read some passages here and there about Courbet's life and learned that during the months prior to painting his famous
Trout,
Courbet had served a jail sentence and suffered severe hemorrhoids.

Philippe and I drove upstream to a bridge over la Loue where Courbet often went to watch trout.

We searched the bushes near the bridge for big stoneflies. Holding them by their abdomens we flicked the insects' heads with our middle fingers and then tossed them, stunned, off the bridge into the feeding zones of the big trout below. The trout watched the crippled stoneflies as they hit the water and floated downstream. Usually they took them with big sucking swirls, but sometimes they just rose and touched their noses to them without eating. “
Il le refuse!
” Philippe yelled.

L
A
B
IENNE

P
hilippe showed me all of his favorite views of the nearby river valleys—the Doubs at Goumois, the monastery by the Dessoubre, the turn in the river by the big mansion on la Loue. But the Bienne, above all, seemed to be Philippe's most secret trout river in the Jura.

Part of the attraction of the Bienne for Philippe was its difficulty. He also had not been fishing it that long; therefore, like a new love, it held the allure of the unknown. By contrast, he knew just about every fish on the Loue near his home.

“There are fewer fish in the Bienne,” Philippe remarked, comparing the two rivers, with a tone as if to say that was good “not because more people fish it; there just aren't that many. But the ones that are there are big and difficult to catch.”

We parked on the first bridge over the Bienne and stepped out of the car to take a look. Upstream of the bridge, Philippe spotted a good trout.

“Do you see it?” Philippe asked me, “it's next to the willow with the twisted branch, on top of the white rock.” Philippe made a mental note of the fish's position. He took his fly rod out of the red Citroën and strung the line through the guides.