Every August the most fashionable of fashionable Parisians pack their race horses and head for a 1,000-year-old village on the Normandy coast, 120 miles away. In old Deauville (pop. 5,438) they unpack their purses at three luxury hotels, two race tracks, six nightclubs, a pair of golf courses, 24 tennis courts, a yacht basin, theater, music hall, polo field, clay-pigeon shoot and one of Europe's busiest and most sumptuous casinos. Says a French social commentator: "Deauville is to Paris what Pompeii was to Rome."
Though Deauville has been socially registered since Emperor...