Cap-Ferrat defines the French Riviera at its most opulent. G.Y. Dyransky celebrates an enclave that remains clear of the crowd. It may be full of the very rich, but it's no gated community.

Presqu'île means peninsula, "almost an island." For my money (not that of a rich man), Cap-Ferrat, a green presqu'île jutting out beyond the little port of St-Jean on the Mediterranean, is close to being a vacationer's Shangri-la. These days, the insomniac clubbers, the insensitive rich, and unenlightened foreigners seeking to buy into the legend of the French Riviera miss the road down to St-Jean Harbor (too narrow for a tour bus) and drive on without noticing the cape beyond—a thin two-mile finger of gated villas with vast grounds, thick vegetation, a few quiet little public beaches, and some hotels of character.

Twenty years and more had passed since I was on Cap-Ferrat, and upon my return, almost nothing—except for the people—had changed. Saul Steinberg, that Wall Street titan of his era, later financially troubled, had long since given up his brief ownership of the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, never to return. More recent owners, Lebanese jewelers, had endowed the lobby with a bright and endearingly dubious look that might be called Beirut Traditional. Then Len Blavatnik, a Russian billionaire with American citizenship living in London, bought the hotel, along with Paris's Hôtel Vendôme, for a reported $318 million, in the name of his U.S. company S.T.T. Properties. It was recently shuttered for yet another face-lift. Alberto Pinto, a decorator dear to the rich, devoted himself to gussying up the best suite in the house. Whatever "relooking," as the French say, was in store, this hotel was bound to prevail as an evocative Riviera landmark. It rises within its lush fourteen-acre compound at the very point of Cap-Ferrat like a great white paradigm of La Belle Epoque—all flowers, palm trees, and umbrella pines above a bright sea.

People of many kinds come and go, and Cap-Ferrat digests their passage. Steinberg sold when, it is said, he was shocked to learn that in order to build an extension to the hotel he would need to give the right gift. René Vestri, Cap-Ferrat's affable mayor, dismissed that charge when I saw him. He pointed out that it is illegal to build almost anything new on the cape.

The Belle Epoque-, Art Deco-, and Renaissance-inspired villas, where kings Léopold II of Belgium and Umberto of Italy—along with lords, ladies, and the likes of Burton and Taylor, David Niven, Gregory Peck, Sean Connery, Charlie Chaplin, and so on—once spent long seasons, are now mostly inhabited by a new wave of residents: Russians, Lebanese, and Italians of obscure power and wealth. Today's celebrities are "zappers," Mayor Vestri said. One day they're in Africa, another they're in Croatia. They're seen on Cap-Ferrat only fleetingly if at all. The newcomers plunk down $25 million for a villa. Cap-Ferrat is now the priciest real estate on the coast.

"If you poke your nose over a fence, you're likely to find a guard's pistol in your nostril," a cape stalwart told me. It was here, in his villa, La Mauresque, that Somerset Maugham made the pronouncement whose aptness has outlived his beautifully crafted novels: "The Riviera is a sunny place for shady people." Whatever the moral hue of some of those people in the hushed villas may be, it won't have an immediate bearing on your stay. The cape is a particularly safe place—safer than, say, Nice, where road signs advised me to keep my car doors locked and where the mayor told hoteliers to warn guests not to be in the Old Town after one o'clock in the morning. Maybe the petty criminals of the coast have also heard about the pistols over the fence.