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From now-forgotten Balkan royalty to British aristocrats, Greek shipping tycoons and Middle Eastern sheikhs, France's Mediterranean playground has seen many waves of wealth wash upon its shores.
But for wild spending and - say French arbiters of taste - utter tackiness, nothing is likely to match the Russian
oligarchs, who are buying up every luxurious inch of the Cote d'Azur.
Awash with petrodollars and the assets that once belonged to the Soviet state, a handful of multibillionaires and a poorer tribe of mere billionaires have set the property market and local sentiment ablaze.
At St-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Saint-Tropez, Antibes and Villefranche-sur-Mer, the skies buzz with helicopters, ferrying guests from liner-sized yachts with helipads to walled villas.
Black bulletproof limousines with gun-toting guards, Ferraris and Porsches, weddings in which top singers are paid millions for a guest appearance, caviar feasts and truckloads of shopping are all part of the circus.
At the airport, private jets are on standby to whisk bored guests to the chateaux of the Loire, the ski slopes of Courchevel or the vineyards of Bordeaux for a break.
The bourgeois of the Cote have watched agog as these brash men in flashy clothes and their tottering chemical blondes have set up in their neighbourhood.
To a generation used to the sedate, self-assured style that comes from old money, it's the song of the vulgar boatmen - and it appals.
"The world has been turned upside down," says Jean-Francois Ribaud of Nice-Matin, the local daily, who chronicles the follies of the "novoritch," as the new plutocrats are known.
In a tiny swathe of the southern French coast, property prices have risen by up to 1000 per cent in five years.
The inflation is particularly pronounced among homes right on the sea and which have had famous owners in the past.
In the past two years, four such properties have found buyers at more than 100 million euros (NZD$215 million), including the Villa Serena, where Edith Piaf once lived, connected to the rest of the world by cable car.
Some of the deals have been wrapped up in as little as 15 minutes by tycoons for which the price seems little more than petty cash.
In May, Le Parisien daily reported, a member of the Russian parliament sent an envoy to approach a property dealer, who showed the go-between a property at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin priced at 15 million euros.
"This price is a joke," the estate agent was told. "If I say this to my boss, he won't take you seriously. He certainly won't bother coming over to have a look." When the price was doubled, the envoy still laughed it off as not worth the visit.
Yet even these insane prices have been dwarfed by the US$500 million ($700 million) cheque signed for the coast's biggest available jewel: Leopolda.
A castle-sized villa at Villefranche complete with a synagogue in malachite and 1200 native Mediterranean trees tended by an army of 25 gardeners, the property was built in 1900 by King Leopold of the Belgians.
The rumour mill about Leopolda's new owner is running at full tilt. The smart money is being put on Roman Abramovich, owner of Chelsea football club and whose fortune, estimated by Forbes magazine at US$23 billion, makes him the world's 14th richest man.
In 2004, Abramovich plonked down US$30 million for the Chateau de la Croe in Antibes' "Billionaires' Bay," an 80ha, 12-bedroom property where the ill-starred Duke of Windsor and his wife, Wallace Simpson, staged lavish parties.
Abramovich has embarked on a new high-spending chapter in his life, or so goes the tale. Last year, he divorced the mother of his five children and is now engaged to a 26-year-old London-based model who is heiress to a Russian oil fortune.
But other oligarchs aren't bashful, about showing their bling, either. One of them is Andrei Melnichenko, a 36-year-old industrialist, whose adoration of his wife, Aleksandra, 31, a former Yugoslav supermodel, is unfettered by finance.
Their 2005 wedding bash on the Cote d'Azur reputedly cost US$35 million. If the celebrity press are right, the newlyweds exchanged vows in an Orthodox chapel which was dismantled in Russia, transported over and reassembled. The couple were serenaded by Christina Aguilera, who picked up a US$3.6 million fee just to sing three songs. She was joined on stage by Whitney Houston, Julio Iglesias and his son Enrique.
Heading down to the Mediterranean right now is Melnichenko's super-yacht, which has just completed trials in the Baltic. The astonishing motor vessel, named A after the couple's first names, displaces 5900 tonnes, measures 120 metres and cost at least US$300 million.
Conceived in great secrecy by French designer Philippe Starck, A was built in Germany by the same shipyard, Blohm und Voss, that constructed the pocket battleship the Bismarck, the Wall Street Journal says.
With a knifelike hull and the profile of a radar-deflecting warship, the yacht boasts a helipad, a hovercraft, two swimming pools, two nine-metre speedboats and a garage for Melnichenko's car. The master bedroom, with a panoramic view in the three-storey superstructure has a revolving floor so that the couple can orient their bed so that they get the best view through the semi-circle of full-length windows.
For all its James Bond style, A is set to be outclassed by a record-busting Abramovich behemoth now under construction. Baptised Eclipse, it will be 188m long - close to the length of two rugby fields - and displace 13,000 tonnes.
Herd pressure has lured scores, possibly hundreds of other mega-wealthy Russians and nationals from former Soviet central Asia to the Cote, all hankering for the same things - the villa, the boat, the jewellery.
They are massive spenders in the luxury boutiques, with an unerring eye for garments more usually seen inside a pole-dancing club.
Generally, the eccentricities are taken in good stride.
One tycoon studded the grounds of one of his two villas near Nice with high-tech cameras. The equipment was not for security but to let the billionaire admire his rose bushes over the internet while he was in Moscow, and instruct his gardeners.
But other behaviour has overstepped the mark.
One oligarch was mystified when told he could not bid for the magnificent Ephrussi palace, built by the Rothschilds on the heights of Cap Ferrat - and bequeathed to the French public for eternity.
Another wanted to raise the height of the local lighthouse, at a cost of 15 million euros that he was eager to pay, so that he could extend his villa, which already had 1500sq m of living space.
At Beaulieu-sur-Mer, an unidentified oligarch, irked by the noise from a distant train line, offered 100 million euros to the state-owned railway to divert the traffic.
All have been rebuffed - even the mighty Abramovich, whose company began building a 22m jetty, in breach of coastal protection laws, so that he could moor his yachts at the foot of his villa.
A local sea-urchin fisherman took pictures of the underwater work and gave them to the mayor of Antibes, Jean Leonetti, who demanded a halt.
"Just because someone is rich doesn't mean they are above the law," sniffed Leonetti.
