TRAVELING IN STYLE : THE PAST AS PRESENT : Sometimes we need to travel slowly, listening to shadowy companions who have been there ahead of us. For they enjoyed an infinite supply of one travel luxury we lack--time

If you listen on a silken summer evening along the Cote d’Azur, in the twilight time they call l’heure bleue , when the sea and sky turn blue-gray and the horizon is a narrow smudge, you might hear the ghosts of earlier travelers: Zelda Fitzgerald laughing as a handsome partner twirls her around a dance floor covered with jagged broken glass from another party, both of them oblivious to it, neither of them hurt--at least that’s the way Pablo Picasso described it--and all the while, Scott Fitzgerald sitting and drinking, never once looking at his wife.

Or it might be the sound of a bagpiper playing for “the Countess Balmoral” (Queen Victoria in a shallow disguise), on her holiday carriage rides on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, accompanied by a retinue of kilted Scottish guards; the notes of Russian violins from the party Princess Souvarov was so loath to end that she bought the villa she’d hired to house it rather than send her guests away; the brittle and banal echoes of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, a pair made tragic by the tarnish of perpetual exile; the telephone calls to New York by American newspaperman James Gordon Bennett, who paid for a line to be run from Nice into his favorite bar at La Reserve in Beaulieu, that still carries the original number--1 (01-00-01).

Sometimes we need to travel slowly, listening to shadowy companions who have been there ahead of us. In spite of their statistically shorter life spans, they enjoyed an infinite supply of one travel luxury we lack--time.

Even the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, which thought itself so fast and flip and frenzied, had, in retrospect, its languid moments, when love affairs began and ended on transatlantic crossings, and veiled glances between strangers on a train might cause innocent hearts to skip a beat.

What we miss most when we are sealed into metal capsules and hurtled through space like cosmic parcels is a sense of romance. The enormous popularity of the lush film version of E. M. Forster’s “A Room with a View,” set in a pensione in Florence at the turn of the century, made us yearn for a leisurely sojourn in golden Tuscany at the same time that it made us laugh at the self-consciously cultured English literati of the period.

The art of timeless travel comes in snaring at least the illusion of endless moments such as when the Hawaiian god Maui lassoed the sun to slow it down so his mother’s tapa would dry. We must find a destination or mode of travel that is not in a hurry, a timeless experience that is genuine rather than a Disneylandish simulacrum or a pedantic museum restoration. Truly timeless travel should let us see the world through rose-colored moments that echo rather than slavishly reproduce the past.

As Lorelei Lee, the blonde preferred by all gentlemen of 1925, precociously observed in Anita Loos’ noted book: “A girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht.”

From the 1920s until Prohibition was repealed in 1933, certain American travelers of the sort well-known to Miss Lee had a powerful reason to board a ship. The French Line literature of the time cashed in on “. . . those dear little iced things on their slender crystal stems, utterly French, utterly harmless--and oh so gurglingly good!”

Habitues of the sophisticated world adored crossing the Atlantic in first class, and were loyal to their favorite flags for whatever reason. Said W. Somerset Maugham, when asked why he always traveled on French ships: “Because there’s none of that nonsense about women and children first.”

Of all the great passenger steamship lines, only Cunard still makes frequent transatlantic crossings today. While an afternoon of timeless travel could be spent touring the grand Art Deco salons of the Queen Mary, now moored in Long Beach with most of her grandeur intact, the serious should set aside five days to make an Atlantic crossing on the Queen Elizabeth 2, a voyage that’s as different from a cruise as a rose is from an orchid.

A newly decorated dining room named for the Mauretania displays a painting and model of the QE2’s famous predecessor. But it is the Queen’s Grill high atop the ship, reserved for the occupants of the most expensive cabins and suites, that calls up the past more specifically. The room sparkles in its original black-and-white decor, with silver-framed Erte prints on the walls, silver finger bowls on every table, a breakfast trolley offering 19 kinds of marmalade to spread on the toast in your silver rack, and a solicitous maitre d’hotel spooning out caviar on request.

Even in a fierce storm, the habitues of the private bar adjoining the Queen’s Grill sit calmly, sipping martinis or champagne, chatting lightly while one manicured hand casually steadies the glass. Below, in the public rooms, pale transatlantic-class passengers with glazed eyes may lie morosely about on sofas, but it has never been seemly to get seasick in first class.

The spirit of Lorelei Lee might also waft aboard the new Mediterranean sailing yacht Wind Spirit, whose sails are set in minutes by computers operated from the bridge, or sail from the timeless city of Venice aboard the sybaritic Sea Goddess, whose champagne is crisp and chilled and whose passengers are properly solvent.

In a more innocent century, the introduction of the railway train was met with thundering denunciations from doctors who said the human heart would not be able to stand up under the tremendous velocity and the lungs would be abnormally inflated by the constant rush of air.

Now, of course, the gentle racketing of an old-fashioned train seems soothingly slow and even romantic to the timeless traveler. The best are the newly polished Art Nouveau gems that set out like cruise ships along a prescribed route, stopping frequently for forays into the countryside with a single set of agreeable passengers along for the ride. Lalique crystal, wood parquetry and cut-velvet or tapestry-covered chairs insinuate secret pleasures aboard the Royal Scotsman out of Edinburgh, the Al Andulus Express in Andalusia and the new British Pullman Orient Express in Wales.

In Paris it is the grandiose railway stations that are most evocative, none more so than the Gare de Lyon and its fin de siecle restaurant Le Train Bleu. While gilded nymphs and cherubs cavorted overhead and lambent watercolor scenes of railway destinations promised untold delights to come, a veteran waiter--whose face showed clearly that his feet had hurt for 20 years--plunked down before us two quick and unpretentious plats du jours , perfect grilled chicken, thin and crisp pommes frites and a sprig of watercress, the kind of bistro food difficult to find in the Paris of the 1980s.

A few timeless hotels also come to mind, such as New York’s Algonquin, where the suites named Vanity Fair, New Yorker and Playbill look as hotel accommodations used to look: small, comfortable and utilitarian, not self-conscious re-creations with claw-foot bathtubs and Art Deco lamps. No less a curmudgeon than H. L. Mencken called it “the most comfortable hotel I have ever found in America . . . once I am in my room it lets me alone.”

In London’s Savoy, another timeless treasure, the rooms’ gas fireplaces have coals that give off a cheery glow in winter; there are also heated towel racks and souvenir slippers and gold toothbrushes, plus huge hothouse grapes, the biggest in the world, clipped and nestled in a basket. Its Wedgwood china commemorates a champagne millionaire named Kessler, who in the 1920s flooded the hotel’s central court and turned it into a miniature Venice with gondolas and gondoliers.

The giddy silliness of Felix, an elegant, sleek, black ceramic cat, would have delighted Zelda Fitzgerald. When there were 13 at table, perhaps in The Other Club Monday night dinners organized by Winston Churchill, Felix was ceremoniously brought in to join the party, a napkin tied around his neck, and the entire meal was served to him course by course. These days, we are told, he still is brought in to fill out the table, but he gets only a dish of cream.

Brenner’s Park-Hotel in Baden Baden, which has soothed a century of malaise among Europe’s rich and famous, is another timeless hotel. To properly appreciate its status among the crowned heads and titled aristocracy of Europe, one should attempt to book lodgings during the September race week, but unfortunately, “somebody has to die before you get a place.”

The glamorous casino is all golden cherubs, silk tapestries, and croupiers in correct black and white. In town, the Konig confiserie with its candied violets and rose petals and pastries as pretty as Victorian valentines is only steps away from the house where Dostoevsky worked on his novels in despair between losing bouts at the gaming tables.

If you listen carefully, you may hear him weeping.