This Happy Few

All winter long Saint-Tropez is a sleepy, shuttered town on the French Riviera, tucked away in a bay between Cannes and Toulon. Its 4,000 citizens long earned their meager living either by fishing or by working at the nearby naval torpedo factory. About the only vehicles that drove through its shabby streets, until about five years ago, were the creaking buses that carried the laborers back and forth to work. Then, for no apparent reason at all, "St. Trop" (pronounced Sen-tro) suddenly became chic. Today the boom is at a height: Saint-Tropez has become the favorite Riviera resort of France's fashionable eccentric.

They are a sight to see. A sort of minute-made elite ("Nescafe Society," one French journalist calls it), the summer crowd at St. Trop, though liberally sprinkled with titles, seems to have invented itself. The visitors are almost always young, and though they may change companions from year to year, they rarely come alone. In the bay that once knew only fishing boats, as many as 80 yachts may lie at anchor. The narrow streets hum with Ferraris, Lancias, Mercedes and Aston Martins. To be seen at the wheel of a mere Jaguar or Austin-Healey is considered ordinary. To drive a Thunderbird is definitely parvenu.

Never Twice. The goddesses of St. Trop are Brigitte Bardot and Franchise Sagan, both of whom were holding court there last week. The men wear shorts and rope sandals; the women, with or without Bardot's dimensions, wear floppy white hats, brightly colored loose shirts, and pastel trousers so tight that they look as though they had been stuck on. Their feet are bare and bronzed. The czarina of fashion is a waterfront couturiere named Madame Vachon who employs a whole army of peasant girls to sew and cut and iron the simple summer uniforms of the chic. Like many another Tropezien, Madame Vachon has grown very rich, for in Saint-Tropez no one is seen wearing the same shirt or trousers two days in a row.

To be accepted among the happy few, one should be more than well off, though in July and August a waterfront apartment may rent for as much as $1.000 a month, and money, therefore, has its uses. Most of the summer invaders seem to have come straight out of Sagan, who wrote one of her novels there (Hollywood's Bonjour Tristesse was filmed in the town), or out of Brigitte's film And God Created Women, which was also filmed there. For the energetic--those who struggle out of bed before 5 p.m.--there are the long, white beaches, but they are about five miles away. Nobody bothers much to swim or waterski; the beaches are for lolling, in or half out of bikinis. During the day, St. Trop is for the most part a ghost town, much as it was before it was "discovered." At night it blazes into life.

Never the Foxtrot. The evening begins with aperitifs at a quay-side sidewalk cafe called Senequier. Then, for the gone set, come the frenetic visits to the town's ten nightclubs, mostly dimly lit bistros in stuffy cellars. Here, it is not the thing to foxtrot, rock 'n' roll or cha-cha-cha. The favorite dances are the Charleston, the polka, and something called the tamoure, in which the feet scarcely move at all. At revel's end, the bright young things stagger off to bed. Most St. Trop hotels, which are just little walk-ups that have struck it rich, provide neither room service nor hotel keys. They prefer to let their guests fall where they may.

About all that is left of the old days is the August fishing fete, during which a flower-laden boat is burned in the bay, and the annual procession, bearing through the streets the bust of the martyred Saint Tropez, whom the Romans beheaded around A.D. 68. In 1637 the power of Saint Tropez was summoned to turn back an invasion of 21 Spanish galleons. Today, during another kind of invasion, he sits out the summer forlornly, unnoticed in his niche in the chapel of Monsieur le Cure.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.