In the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows there’s a word that matches how I felt when I woke up aboard the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. ‘Ambedo’, the book states, is a melancholic trance in which one becomes absorbed in vivid sensory details: raindrops on a window; clouds of milk swirling in coffee.
I observed both in my bijou suite while listening to sulky Chet Baker. Sad jazz helped me to tune into the period charisma this train swaddles you in. The carriage around me – all deco brass and glossy marquetry – has hosted a hundred years of hedonism. In that quiet moment, I could feel the echo of that merrymaking and it made me a bit sad.
Of course, this dewy-eyed rumination could simply have been the result of my not insubstantial hangover. Having partied as hard as one can in a nine-foot-wide bar-car, I finally fell onto my pullout bed, then came round a few hours later, fully clothed in a double-breasted number borrowed from Hunstman. This, I was later told by train manager Pascal Deyrolle, was not uncommon. “Who comes on here to sleep?”
And, well, there was good reason to celebrate: this trip marked the storied train’s inaugural journey from Paris to the Alps – and, in this case, glitzy Courchevel. You see, darlings, avant is the new après and where better to carouse before skiing then aboard the world’s most lavish locomotive? Indeed, I couldn’t have been giddier as we boarded at the Gare de Lyon.
But why is the Orient Express such a bucklister? Well, where else promises glamour, romance, fiction, history, theatre and Thomas the Tank Engine nostalgia in one rolling hit? This lacquered anachronism sells them all and, for most of us, buying is a one-time deal.
After posing on the platform with the staff, dashing in their wintry livery, I found my cabin and sharpened up for the big show. First, it was down to 3674, the aforementioned bar-car, with its needle-sharp martinis and raffish Italian bartenders. A white-jacket crooner, breezily leaning on a piano, winked as I was passed my first drink.
Too often when travelling, someone in fluoro athleisure is ruining the view. But tonight, the crowd looked Gatsby gorgeous: men in penguins, women in flappers; we were all now actors in a flirtatious Poirot panto. Life imitating art imitating life.
Luxury and fun can tend to be inversely proportional, but here was the exception: sipping, singing and swilleving your hips was everyone’s bitpart in the play. "Were not in hospitality,” said Deyrolle, stood next to me, sipping a vintage Chateau D'Yquem. "We’re in show business – and all of you are part of the performance."
Act II: dinner. We exited bar left and jigged a few carriages down to restaurant L’Oriental where pink Perrier-Jouët gushed into monogrammed flutes. I sat down and tried to peer out of the window – black nothing; a bit like the cinema – before tipping a few oysters back and scanning the menu. Jean Imbert, France’s Michelin-starred enfant terrible, is the train’s other big news and he was on board, too. I passed him a few times and, well, he lived up to his aloofness.
His chicken in XO-cognac albufera sauce made up for it, though – as did the accompanying beaujolais (whose eponymous region we’d soon be passing through). The Italians were soon back, this time belting out Renato Carosone’s ‘Tu Vuò Fà l'Americano’ and for a second I felt like Matt Damon’s Mr Ripley swooning over Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf.
That, I think, is sort of the point: the immersion is so finessed that even the most self-aware among you are likely to be lulled into a filmic reverie. Everyone apart from our noble chef, that is, who decided to plonk a TV in the bar-car to watch the footy. Classic Imbert.
If I were him, I’d have set it up in one of the three Grand Suites he was staying in. They’re certainly big enough and the only option for those who refuse to share a loo (no marbled en-suites in the trad cabins, I’m afraid). Other USPs include a double bed, mosaic floors (laid by the same fella who refurbed the Palais Garnier) and a velvet settee from which to gawp at the snow-sprinkled beauty of the Savoie.
The suites’ Baracat and Lalique lamps – fortuitously found in Parisian flea markets – are Deyrolle’s favourite items onboard. That this was one of the carriages that inspired Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express bumps the cachet further still.
Brunch, the denouement of our Golden Age cosplay, was Imbert’s coup de maître: coddled eggs with caviar, langoustine ravioli in a panacea bisque, the cutest of tarte tatins and enough champagne to forget the effects of last night’s champagne. Bravo.
Skiing in Courchevel was skiing in Courchevel. In honesty, I spent most of the time longing to be back aboard – or suffering from ‘aulasy’: the sadness of knowing that there’s no way to convey a powerful memory to people who weren’t there at the time. December 21 is your chance to feel the same.
Details
The Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, A Belmond Train will travel from Paris to the French Alps (stopping at Albertville, Moûtiers and Bourg-Saint-Maurice) on 21st December 2023, for a one-night journey.
Prices start from £2,730pp in a Historic Suite, to include complimentary pre-departure transfers between the train and your accommodation, one night aboard the train with dedicated steward service, a four-course dinner with sommelier wines, lunch and breakfast designed by Michelin-starred Chef, Jean Imbert. belmond.com
