Is Cap-Ferrat very French, even for all the generations of foreigners who've declared it theirs? There are still some heirs of the nineteenth-century grande bourgeoisie holding out among the villas that their forefathers built: the Bleriot family, who once manufactured airplanes, and the Marnier-Lapostelles, whose Grand Marnier was a must ingredient for now quaint crêpes suzette (the Marnier-Lapostelles own the villa Les Cèdres, once the property of Léopold II). The cape has always drawn interesting foreigners because it is one of those places where the hands of man and of nature have worked wonderful complicity. Leben wie der Herrgott in Frankreich is what the Germans say to describe the great life: "to live like God himself in France." The Riviera as a whole, meanwhile, has become what Graham Greene, who spent his last years near Nice, once said of Bruges: "a much trafficked jewel." Much trafficked in both senses of the verb. There's indeed another French word, betonné, which means cemented, and it's the term for the overbuilding all along the Côte d'Azur, including the stretch between Nice and the Italian border that is, technically, what we call the Riviera.

It seems to me that Cap-Ferrat has managed to be almost an island protected from all that has befallen the Riviera. The heydays of royalty and robber barons, the communal frolics of celluloid stars, have passed here, as elsewhere. But I think of the clean blue sea; the untouched stretches of umbrella pines, rhododendrons, jasmine, and cactus; the sensuous look that man added to the place with a careful yet indulgent eye for decoration, when less was not more. All this is still barely disturbed by noise—other than the wash of waves and the high-pitched buzz of cicadas—or by fumes that would mar the wild herbal odor on warm air. The glow of what was the bounty of the privileged is still like a vestal flame, and more accessible here than in any place else I know.