The René Lalique glass that people photograph on board and file under "Orient Express" was never designed for the Orient Express. It was made for a Riviera day train — the Côte d'Azur Pullman Express, inaugurated on 9 December 1929 — which ran for less than a decade and was finished by the spring of 1939.
The mix-up is worth untangling, because the real story is better than the legend. It involves two men called René working on the same carriages, a third designer whose name is usually left off entirely, and a set of panels that outlived the train they were built for by nearly a century.
The glass went south, not east
Lalique's railway commission belongs to the Côte d'Azur Pullman Express, a joint operation of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits and the Paris–Lyon–Méditerranée railway, running from Paris's Gare de Lyon to Ventimiglia on the Italian frontier. The Orient Express of the same years went in the opposite direction, and it was a sleeping-car train; the Côte d'Azur cars were Pullmans — day saloons with armchairs, built for people travelling to winter on the Riviera and expecting to be looked at while they did it.
The two services shared an operator, a design language and, eventually, a pool of rolling stock, which is how the confusion took hold. The company that ran both had been built by Georges Nagelmackers, whose European sleeping-car empire had by the late 1920s absorbed the Pullman idea that an American undertaker's clerk had patented on the far side of the Atlantic. Add a 1974 film shot in Art Deco interiors, and a century of Orient Express mythology quietly annexed a Riviera train's fittings.
Thirty-four steel cars for a fifteen-hour run
The series ran to thirty-four cars, numbered 4131 to 4164, delivered in two batches by Entreprises Industrielles Charentaises at Aytré, outside La Rochelle. They came in two layouts: twenty-seat cars with a kitchen, and twenty-eight-seat cars without. Every car was first class. Each side carried seven widened window bays, and the armchairs were both broader than the previous standard and reclining — a specification that would not embarrass a modern first-class cabin.
The timetable allowed fifteen hours ten minutes from Paris to Ventimiglia. It was not a fast train by the standards of its own decade, and was not meant to be. By the winter of 1932 the service was being trimmed, turning short of the border at Menton.
What Lalique actually made
By 1929 René Lalique had long since left the Art Nouveau jewellery that made his name and had become, in effect, an industrialist of glass, working out of a factory at Wingen-sur-Moder in Alsace. His method was press-moulding rather than blowing: glass forced into steel dies, in editions, with the surface worked so that clear and frosted areas sit against each other and catch low interior light. It is a technique built for repetition, which is what a fleet of thirty-four carriages required.
What he supplied were partition panels for the ends of the saloons — tall figural pieces of nudes in various attitudes, with smaller sections above carrying grapes and vines. The Victoria and Albert Museum, which holds one of them under the title Blackbirds and Grapes, dates his design work for these carriages to 1928; auction records and the Musée Lalique place the related Côte d'Azur statuette at 12 October 1929. The two dates are not in conflict so much as a year apart on either side of the drawing board.
The other René, and the panelling everyone misattributes
Much of what visitors point at and call "the Lalique panelling" is not glass at all. It is the work of René Prou, the decorator who handled the woodwork and furniture. Prou was born in Nantes — sources disagree on the year, with auction catalogues giving 1889 and biographical accounts 1887 — trained at the École Bernard-Palissy in Paris, and worked for the firms Gouffé and Schmit before setting up under his own name after the First World War.
He had been shaping Wagons-Lits interiors since the early 1920s, and his marquetry went into the S-type sleeping cars used on the Orient Express and the Calais–Méditerranée. In the Côte d'Azur cars his walls were sycamore, inlaid with bouquets of flowers rendered in silver powder and pressed glass, in at least five different bouquet designs. Accounts of the series describe the decoration as shared between the two men rather than handed to Lalique alone, which is the single most useful correction to make about these carriages.
Prou also taught. Over two decades at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs he took more than three thousand students, among them Charlotte Perriand — a lineage that runs from Pullman marquetry straight into twentieth-century modernism.
The third designer in the carriage
Suzanne Lalique-Haviland (1892–1989) is the name that falls off the credit list. A painter who later designed sets and costumes for the Comédie-Française, she had already collaborated with her father on the first-class lounges of the liner Paris in 1921.
For the Côte d'Azur cars she designed the upholstery covering Prou's armchairs, the porcelain table service produced by Théodore Haviland at Limoges, and a beige carpet patterned in brown with staggered rows of railway lines. That last detail is the wittiest thing in the whole interior: passengers walked on a stylised drawing of the track beneath them.
Ten years of service, then dispersal
- 1921 — René and Suzanne Lalique collaborate on the first-class lounges of the liner Paris.
- 1928 — Lalique's panel designs for the new Pullman carriages are dated by the V&A to this year.
- 9 December 1929 — the Côte d'Azur Pullman Express enters service, Paris to Ventimiglia.
- Winter 1932 — the service is cut back, terminating at Menton.
- May 1939 — the train runs for the last time.
- 1977 — two original Wagons-Lits carriages are bought at auction in Monte Carlo, beginning a reassembly of the stock.
- 1982 — the rebuilt train re-enters service between London and Venice.
- 2011 — the Musée Lalique acquires a life-size reconstruction of a Côte d'Azur interior, complete with Suzanne's fabrics and the Haviland service.
After 1939 the cars scattered. Some were broken up, some stripped, some left in sidings. Individual panels entered museum collections and the auction market, where Côte d'Azur glass sells as sculpture rather than as fittings. The reconstruction at Wingen-sur-Moder exists precisely because so little of the original survived intact.
Where you can still sit inside it
One car did survive in working order. Restaurant car 4141, built in 1929, carries Lalique glass in the Côte d'Azur style and runs today on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, the composite train assembled from Wagons-Lits stock built between 1926 and 1949. Sleeping car 3543 on the same train is a Prou interior, originally delivered for the Pyrénées–Côte d'Argent Express. The result is a train that is historically a little promiscuous — carriages from different services and decades coupled together — but which puts you in a genuine 1929 saloon somewhere short of Venice.
The British Pullman cars that run the London end of the same journey come from a parallel tradition, and the British Pullman is the place to see how differently the idea was interpreted on the far side of the Channel. In Italy, the Orient Express La Dolce Vita applies mid-century Italian design to the same sleeping-car format rather than the Art Deco one. If you want to work out which of the several trains carrying the Orient Express name actually descends from which stock, our comparison of the Orient Express trains sets them side by side — and the wider question of how railway carriages became rooms at all is taken up in the story of Ludwig II's royal train. The full fleet is worth a browse.
