Cast And Cast Again

Be at No. 15 Place Vend�me Monday morning at 9:15 sharp," the wire read. No. 15 Place Vend�me is the address of Paris' Ritz Hotel, where two days earlier my wife and I had met the owner, Charles Ritz, and had promptly earned his disapproval of our fly-casting techniques. I wanted to talk to him not about fishing but about the literary associations of the Ritz—which is so very rich in them—but when I asked Charles for his recollections of Proust, who for years dined there nightly, he said, "I may have seen him. He was another flyswatter." That was Charles' name for anybody who was not a fly-fisherman. I dropped the subject. He then got it out of us that we did not practice the technique of fly casting he prescribes in his book A Fly Fisher's Life. We did it wrong then, and provided we did not turn out to be too old to learn, he was determined to teach us the right way.

So his wire was not an invitation but a summons, a command, and we were there exactly on time. However, at half past nine we were still sitting in Charles' car with him and his chauffeur, waiting. For what, we were not told.

Presently there appeared on the Place, headed our way, a short, slight, bespectacled young man dressed in knickers, a bulky sweater and a tweed cap, carrying large canvas bags slung from both shoulders and, over one, a bundle of fishing rods in their cases.

"There's my boy," said Charles.

This was the beginning of my acquaintance with Pierre Affre, a little man with a big ambition, in fact an obsession, a man in a race against time and against many other men in quest of a prize for which all of them, as nobody knows better than Pierre, were probably born too late.

That morning at the casting pool in the Bois de Boulogne, Charles Ritz almost ruined my fly casting, such as it was. Just watching him cast was enough to discourage me. Square-shouldered and erect as a drill sergeant at the age of 80—he died when he was 84—he could lay out 100 feet of line with a light rod, softly and with perfect aim, and make it look easy. He had perfected his own method of casting, had made a religion of it and become a zealot preaching it. After an hour of his coaching I could no longer cast my own way, and it was plain to me that to master his I would have to be born again. Charles then left me to practice while he turned his attention to my wife.

Behind Charles' back I reverted to my old bad habits, hoping to regain a little self-respect. Pierre Affre joined me and, in English, said quietly, "You should not listen to Mr. Ritz. You cast far enough to catch fish. He wants for everybody to be a tournament champion. Do it your way."

I complimented Pierre on his English. It was hard to believe that he had been speaking it for only one year. He had dropped Russian to study it. Why, I wondered. "I had to," he explained. "English is the language of fly-fishing."

Of Pierre Affre's ability with a fly rod, perhaps no more need be said than that for eight of his 30 years he has been the fly-casting champion of France and has won medals as his country's entrant in international tournaments. That day in the Bois de Boulogne what I was shown as he and Charles Ritz cast side by side resembled nothing so much as a duo sonata—music without sound—rendered by an old maestro and his prize pupil. What many people can do, those two were doing as few people can or ever have. Just to cast a fly rod is not very difficult, but the difference between competence at it and artistry is about the equivalent of the musical comb compared to the violin. Measured against either of those virtuosi, my fly-casting motions were those of somebody beating a rug, while each cast of theirs had the finesse, the assurance and the dispatch of a diamond cutter splitting a stone. Between the two there was that sense of shared pleasure and a common bond that chamber-music players have, the young man revering the old one, he finding in his young friend a continuity that would last after him.

Pierre lived like a Balzac character in an apartment in Paris surrounded, almost swamped, by the paraphernalia of his id�e fixe. Fishing rods in sheaves were stacked in every corner of his three rooms. Reels lay everywhere. Tents, camp stoves, backpacks, axes were piled in the middle of the floor. Books and magazines, all devoted to fishing, were stacked against the walls. A tabletop was heaped with correspondence from fishermen and conservation clubs.