Needless to say, neither hotel is inexpensive, particularly when the dollar is where it is. They will set you back the price of a room in a luxurious hotel in Paris. But, as I suggested earlier, you need not be rich to love Cap-Ferrat—nor do you feel ostracized from the social swim. There is no preening "scene," and R and R is the operative term for bathing, sailing, and reading. As for languages, English is the second one on the cape, where about forty percent of the summer people are American and forty percent are French. The new Chinese, who mill around the Eiffel Tower in droves, have yet to discover Cap-Ferrat, although the cable TV in the Grand has two channels in Russian.

There are six little beaches, four of which are free of charge and have an atmosphere that is also very bon enfant—and nudist-free. The latter factor is important these days on the shores of Europe for people distressed by the seaside fad of letting it all hang out. The French Ministry of Health rates all six cape beaches first quality—no small matter given the dubious waters of the Mediterranean: Nice, for example, has four beaches classified in the second-best category.

The restaurants, whether luxe or not, are no pricier than their equivalents in Paris, and you get the seaside thrown in with a meal. Eating outstanding fish is a chancy thing all along the coast. The cruel reality is that there are few fish left in the Mediterranean, and what you eat will most likely have come down from the Atlantic or been farmed. The Voile d'Or, though, still has a great reputation for bouillabaisse, which is as much a traditional local dish here as it is in Marseille. Yves Maätrehenry owns what is far and away the best of the few inexpensive places to stay on the cape: the Brise Marine, in one of the loveliest locations. It was built in 1878 as a private villa right above a corner of the port. Below the neat rooms, which have the air of a three-star Paris hotel, there is a plain bar for breakfast and a sitting room worthy of a kitsch hotel in Brighton. It's the kind of modest inn that I've seen at other stylish vacation places, where the consciously low-key and savvy share the geography with the rich.

There are other inexpensive hotels where you can profit from the privileged environment of the cape. Iranians have refurbished the Belle Aurore, for instance, but haven't been able to move it from its unhappy location at a crossroads. If you want to hide away in the interior of the cape, you can do so at the Clair Logis, a spartanly furnished former villa with a garden—where Charles de Gaulle spent a moment of what the French call his time in the desert, after he resigned from being president in 1946.

As I talked to Monsieur Maätrehenry at the Brise Marine, Ken Loach, the British film director, came up from the beach carrying a parasol. Monsieur Maîtrehenry told me that Loach has been staying at the Brise Marine for more than forty years. Madame Maîtrehenry, whom her husband of more than four decades calls the soul of the hotel, wasn't around, but I got the feeling, ineffably, that the place indeed has a soul.