he Orient Express left Paris from the Gare de l’Est just after 18:30 every Tuesday evening, and it arrived in Vienna shortly before midnight of the next day. The train’s sixteen elegant wagon lits were pulled by a powerful steam-powered locomotive, its mushroomed stack puffing powdery gray smoke into the parabolic sky. The Great Powers were at peace. An attitude of optimism, if not general in the nineteenth century, was, at least, widespread. The French revolution, the Napoleonic wars, and the Congress of Vienna, with its gathering of spidery clerical conservatives, had receded into the past. Writing in 1830, Thomas Macaulay had looked to the future and found it good.[1]
In 1850, the French engineer Eugène Belgrand had undertaken the modernization of the French sewer system, bringing those dark infernal tunnels to standards common in the Roman Empire. Horse-drawn wagons set off for Paris from the countryside early each morning carrying peas, carrots, beets, turnips, great slabs of beef, fish, squawking poultry, all drawn centrifugally toward the city’s center at Les Halles.[2] The sewers reversed their flow, establishing the great equilibrium of civilization.
