Since Léopold bought a huge part of the shoreline in the 1890s to build a villa and sell off the rest, Cap-Ferrat has known a series of great achievers, each of whom left his stamp on Riviera history. (Léopold had a thing for real estate. The Belgian Congo wasn't Belgium's; it was his personal property.) Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, is among today's villa dwellers. His place looms above the port where he moors his ultra-high-tech yacht and where Bill Gates, his fellow co-founder and old friend, sails in to visit in a very modest little boat. Gates was rumored to have been interested in buying the most extraordinary property on the coast, the Villa Léopolda, in nearby Villefranche, which had been the grandest in King Léopold's brace of Riviera residences. Although Gates was said to have made an offer to Lilly Safra, widow of the banker Edmund Safra (victim of a shady murder in Monaco), the villa is still for sale. (For $295 million—anyone interested?)

That last time, long ago, when I was here, Lynn Wyatt, wife of the Texas oilman Oscar Wyatt, was renting Somerset Maugham's former place. This was the tail end of the partying wave at Cap-Ferrat, whose heyday had known Burton, Taylor, Niven, Peck, et al. I had chatted with her then in her lovely ocher villa. This time, she was renting a villa in Villefranche. I had lunch with her son, Steve, a venture capitalist who is of the latest generation of Cap-Ferrat lovers, and some friends. We ate in bathing suits beside the big saltwater pool at the Grand-Hôtel, the far edge of which blends, trompe l'oeil, into a vista of the sea.

Steve had his kids with him. Perched above the pool wearing his big sombrero, Pierre Grüneberg, the swim instructor, was on duty, as he has been for about forty years. Pierre has the enduringly svelte body of someone who has spent his life summering on the cape and wintering on the ski slopes, and has taught more children of the mighty to swim than doubtless any other person on earth.

On the day I arrived, the hotel was inaugurating a little playground in the garden. More than ever, kids are in among the creative and accumulative people who come here. Children fit particularly well into the general atmosphere of the cape, which is not edgily shrill as in St-Tropez nor show-off shrill as in Monte Carlo. Mayor Vestri uses the term bon enfant to describe the mood of his constituency, where the single discotheque—a phenomenon at the hotel Voile d'Or during the Hollywood era—was banned years ago. Bon enfant is hard to translate into English, but it means something like well behaved, friendly—Apollonian, if you will.

My friend Elliott Kastner, a film producer who knew the cape in its Hollywood days, is a devoted client of the Voile d'Or's. "I had been renting the villa at the Hôtel du Cap, in Antibes, for four weeks of the year for twenty-nine years," he told me, "and when I stepped into the Voile d'Or, I knew that I liked it even better." The villa at Antibes's Hôtel du Cap might be called the mother of all luxuries. The Voile d'Or, above the port of St-Jean, is totally different. The owner, Jean Lorenzi, put up the banal building in 1965. But it is nonetheless, with its forty-five rooms, an intimate, un-self-consciously well-furnished place where Lorenzi and his wife and daughter impart a very bon enfant—"just us few lucky ones"—feeling. As in the bar at the Grand-Hôtel du Cap-Ferrat, trophy photos of the famous adorn the walls.