The Sunday Gentleman (36 page)

The personnel of the Orient Express, men like M. Bortolotti, with their stock of fantastic stories, form the most unchanging part of the train. Of those who worked on it before Hitler, most are back on their old jobs again. Only the German conductors are now missing. The boss of the Orient Express, on each journey, is the blue-uniformed
chef de train
, whose position is like that of a purser on a ship but whose authority is greater. He is in charge of the conductors, solves special problems for passengers, keeps in contact with various stations en route, and at trip’s end hands in a log of the journey to the Paris office. He often knows six languages. Bortolotti, for example, besides speaking his native French, has taught himself German, Dutch, Italian, Yugoslav, and English.

The conductors who are under the
chef de train
, one in each coach, are predominantly French and Swiss, and each must, as a minimum, know three languages. The service language of the train is French; all must speak it. The other two tongues are optional, but are usually German and English.

Constant travel between two worlds has made sophisticates of the Orient Express conductors, and surprise is an emotion they rarely feel. The conductors assigned to the subsidiary Orient Express, traveling only to Vienna and back, must guide their flock through four military zones. Conductors state that American MP’s, who invariably come on the train singing, create the greatest consternation. They usually chew gum, and since many Balkan passengers have never seen gum, conductors must patiently explain the ingredients. On this same trip, farther down the line, across the river Enns, bearish Russian soldiers emerge from wooden barracks to inspect military passes. According to the Express conductors, the Russian soldiers from Leningrad and other big cities are bright boys, but those from Asia often hold passengers’ military permits upside down as they pretend to read them, and then approve them if they are colored red. These Russians are rotated weekly, probably so that their thinking may not be sullied by the decadence in evidence on the Orient Express.

Conductors are expected to fulfill almost all passenger requests without batting an eye. Sometimes a conductor will be asked by a prominent Frenchman in Paris to deliver personally champagne or caviar to someone in Sofia. Once, Fritz Kreisler absently left one of his priceless violins in the Austrian Embassy in Warsaw. He remembered the oversight after boarding the Orient Express, and asked the conductor to take care of the matter. The violin reached Kreisler safely a week later. Another time, when there was plenty of space available, a millionaire from Bucharest came on the train and asked the conductor to sell him three compartments so that he might have one for sleeping, one for working with his secretary, and one in which to smoke. And there was the occasion, according to the story, when Josephine Baker—the renowned colored entertainer, who left St. Louis to thrill Paris with her dance performed in a G-string of bananas—woke hungry at two in the morning on the Orient Express, and demanded cheese sandwiches and beer. When she was told by the conductor that this request was somewhat unreasonable, she asked to be taken to the sleepy-eyed chef and then proceeded to promise him that if he would go to work at this hour in the kitchen for her, she in turn would perform for him. The chef eagerly agreed, delivered the repast, and
la Bakhair
danced for it in her nightie, in the diner aisle, as the Orient Express rolled into the dawn.

Because they extend such special services, the personnel of the train is able to supplement its salary with generous tips. In fact, the subject of tips is the topic most thoroughly discussed and debated by the conductors when, after each journey, they meet amid the oyster baskets and wine bottles of the railroad cafe, Au Depart, across from the Gare de Lyon. As a result, the subject of tipping on the Orient Express has a thoroughly documented history. The conductors enjoy breaking down tipping into categories. For instance, they classify tippers according to nationality. Most conductors seem to agree that, before the war, the highest tippers were the German travelers, not only industrialists but officials like von Papen and Funk. On the other hand, conductors regard South Americans, particularly Argentinians, as the most tight-fisted of all passengers. “Perhaps the rich men from Argentina don’t know any better,” said one conductor, “or perhaps they are just stingy.” Most conductors feel that, as a class, pre-1914 royalty like the Grand Dukes of Russia or the Queen of Austria or a random Esterhazy tipped most handsomely.

All personnel on the Orient Express, from the highest operational official to the youngest conductor, unanimously agree that the best modern tipper among the bluebloods and, in fact, the most colorful character ever to travel the Orient Express, was King Boris III of Bulgaria. Before the war, King Boris, a gentle, charming man in his late forties, who once listed as his pet hobby “locomotive driving,” would invite train personnel into his compartment for tea and discuss every aspect of the Orient Express as if it were his very own toy. He was, in truth, in love with the train. For years, on every trip between Sofia and Paris, after becoming bored reading his stack of newspapers in six languages, he would leave his wife. Queen Giovanna, the Italian Princess of Savoy, knitting in their compartment. He would work his way forward, through car after car, to the engine, and at the first stop, crawl in beside the two French engineers and take over the throttle. This went on for countless trips, over many years, until the word got around that the Orient Express was being driven by the King of Bulgaria. When various diplomats heard this, and then authenticated the fact, they raised a furor. The governments of France and Italy formally advised King Boris that he must not drive the train through their territories, endangering both train passengers and the citizenry. On his first Orient Express excursion after the ban, King Boris sat glumly and slept restlessly through France, Switzerland, Italy, and Yugoslavia, but when the Express reached the Bulgarian border where his own word was law, he left his compartment, pulled on a pair of clean overalls, walked to the engine and took over the throttle to Sofia. More than any other passenger lost in the war, the conductors miss Boris. They insist that he did not die naturally in 1943, that they have inside information he was poisoned by the Gestapo when he refused to turn the Bulgarian Army over to Hitler.

Among plebeians, the most fabulous tipper ever to ride the Orient Express was a Mr. Capile, an Italian shipbuilding millionaire from Genoa. “He was a wonderful man,” recalls one conductor. “He enjoyed the train. At the end of each trip, he would go into the kitchen, among the kettles, compliment the chef, tip him and his assistants, and then he would tip the
chef de train
and then the conductor. One time, in two days on the train, he tipped a thousand dollars.”

Some of the Orient Express conductors have become celebrities in their own right. Perhaps the most famous is seventy-three-year-old Jean Bonnefoy who, in his thirty-five years on the train, hobnobbed with the world’s greats. Today, in his anecdotage, he remembers that Queen Amelia of Portugal would always inquire first if he were on the Orient Express before making her reservations. He recalls, too, how once he stopped the train to rescue the Duke of Windsor when, as a lad, he was left stranded on a platform in Dijon. Bonnefoy’s fame grew as a result of poetry he wrote during long, lonely nights on the Express. One volume,
Visions of Rome
, brought him a personal letter from Benito Mussolini and he was made a Knight of the Crown of Italy. Thereafter, he was the only decorated conductor on the Orient Express.

Today, on pension, Bonnefoy longs for the good old days. “Before the First World War,” he says, “the Orient Express was really luxurious, the upper halves of the compartments painted white, the lower halves built of teakwood. And all personnel, conductors as well as waiters, had to wear white gloves. Things have gone downhill since.” Sometimes, just before ten-fifteen in the evening, Bonnefoy will walk from his flat down into the Gare de Lyon to watch the great train pull out. He will stand in the drafty station and snort at the lack of festivities. As recently as 1939, when the Orient Express took off, it was like a ship embarking on an ocean crossing—great, gay parties to see friends off, singing from compartments, champagne corks popping, all the high bustle and excitement of a bon-voyage celebration. Today, the departure is quiet and efficient. Most people aren’t traveling in Europe for fun. They are going about their business, and there’s usually nothing to toot tin horns about.

When the train pulls out slowly—it will later clip along at 80 kilometers an hour (it used to go 100 an hour, but now there are weak bridges and poor rails)—Jean Bonnefoy will remark, “Ah well, so it is not the same, but there are two things that are the same as ever—the scenery, the glorious sights in all those countries—and the organization that makes seeing the sights and the whole trip itself possible.”

Most of the Wagons-Lits personnel, either for political reasons or because they are genuine converts, like to extol the unseen organization which they serve. However, except for recognizing their immediate superiors, most know little about who owns and runs the Orient Express. For that matter, outsiders know even less. Yet this organization, like an enormous hidden perpetual-motion machine, has sent the Orient Express catapulting from Paris to Istanbul and back again, with precision and without a hitch, for exactly sixty-four years. Actually, the Orient Express is owned by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, located in Brussels, and operated out of a large branch building in Paris, where the messenger boys are outfitted as train conductors. The Orient Express is under the complete authority of a wealthy Frenchman, René Margot-Noblemaire, whose father is manager of the French National Railways. The Noblemaire family has dominated French railroading since the late nineteenth century.

The Wagons-Lits company was conceived in 1872 by a Belgian engineer named Georges Nagelmackers, who had visited the United States, seen the world’s first sleeping cars, and wanted to set up facsimiles of the Pullman in Europe. Nagelmackers’ idea of luxurious sleeping cars was met with derision throughout Europe, and he had almost abandoned the idea when he was summoned by King Leopold II of Belgium to discuss it. The king was enthusiastic and within a year the first Wagons-Lits sleeper—carrying a dozen bunks, heated by burning briquettes, and lit by oil—was placed on the run from Ostend to Berlin. The sleeper was a success, and in 1876, the Wagons-Lits company was organized into its present form. King Leopold was one of the first stockholders, and with the prestige of his name, the company was capitalized to the sum of 4 million Belgian francs.

That was the beginning. Seven years later, the company produced a complete train—boiler engine, two sleeping cars holding a total of twenty-eight persons, one diner with twenty-four seats, two baggage cars—guaranteed to transport pioneers via the historic route used by the Celts, Huns, and Crusaders, from France, running north of the Alps, across Bavaria, down along the Danube, to Turkey. On June 5, 1883, the world’s first international luxury train made a trial run from Paris to Munich to Budapest, to deposit passengers on a steamer that crossed the Black Sea from Varna to what was then Constantinople, in 81 hours and 40 minutes.

Exactly four months later, the Orient Express was officially inaugurated. Speeding along at 55 miles an hour, it went from Paris through Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, and Budapest. Everywhere there were festivities to greet the passengers of Europe’s Iron Horse. At Szeged, Hungary, the furnishings of the diner were pushed aside while a band of eleven gypsy musicians came on and played Viennese waltzes and czardas for two and a half hours. “When the band attacked the ‘Marseillaise,’” reported a nineteenth-century correspondent, Opper de Blowitz of
Le Temps
, “our bearded French cook rushed out of his kitchen and, hand on his heart, with flaming eye and ecstatic face, poured it forth in deep and sonorous voice. We finally had to send him back to his stove to prepare lunch. The gypsies left the train at Temesvár.”

In Bucharest, the Orient Express was held over while the passengers were taken to the Romanian Royal Palace to be received by King Carol I. At Giurgiu, a tiny Romanian town on the Danube, the passengers left the Express, were ferried across to Ruse, on the Bulgarian side, and then proceeded on another section of the train to Varna. This section of the journey was particularly hazardous since the rails were not protected from animals by the usual metal fences and the locomotive swept cows and oxen aside with a vast iron grating, or cowcatcher, attached in front. At Varna, on an inlet of the Black Sea, the passengers sloshed across a muddy field on foot to embark on a small steamer which, despite a choppy sea, brought them in 15 hours to minareted Constantinople. The East and the West had met, and the total time had been 77 hours and 49 minutes.

To arrange this trip, the Wagons-Lits company had conferred, earlier in 1883, with railroad people and royal diplomats of the Duchy of Baden, the Kingdom of Württemberg, and of Bavaria, Austria, and Romania. In the sixty-four years since that first treaty, the Wagons-Lits company, in arranging the various frontier crossings and routes of (he Orient Express, has acted more like a sovereign state than a mere railroad corporation.

In 1888, to give one instance, a manager of the Wagons-Lits company, M. de Richemont, was rushed to Sofia to negotiate with Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria about a new Une that would bypass the Black Sea steamer trip and take the Orient Express straight overland into Turkey. Due to haste, M. de Richemont arrived in Sofia with only two business suits. He was advised by the prince’s aides that he could not enter the palace in ordinary clothes. He made inquiries and, learning that a uniform was considered formal attire, he promptly sent his train personnel into the streets to find anything that resembled one. The men returned with a Bulgarian police captain, who consented to rent his uniform. But this was not enough. To it, M. de Richemont added the accessories of the Wagons-Lits conductor—from cap to service ribbons—and in this way, having satisfied the demands of the prince’s advisers, he entered the Royal Palace and bowed stiffly before Ferdinand. The prince took one look at the outlandish uniform, grinned knowingly and confided, “Isn’t this the damnedest country!” After that, the agreement was easily made, and a year later, the Orient Express went directly from Paris to Constantinople by land and reduced the time of the journey by 14 hours.