Foreign News: 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...