Pike with Butter Sauce

The Loire is a long, murky and dangerous river, broad enough to have sandy islets along some parts of its length, and endlessly fascinating to children. It is there, with my friends Eric and Pilou Imbach, that I learned to build rafts out of river débris, to dive under the submerged tree-roots (swimming in the Loire was absolutely forbidden, which is why I did it), and to fish for pike. The fish were virtually inedible, half bones and half sewage, and my mother was obliged to find all kinds