But this quaint resort is beginning to brighten up, with the grand Hôtel de la Plage now transformed into La Fabrique, a funky lounge bar and restaurant whose DJ gets guests dancing on the waterside terrace, while a year ago, the elegant Marie Collet, turned the top floor of her imposing house into a two-room B&B.
There is a lot of talk about the vicissitudes of life, and being equanimous in the face of adversity, all of which I find rather quaint.
Isn't it quaint how the Tories started to add the word "major" to their "world's fastest growing economy" line, when people pointed out that, say, China and India had grown faster?
The latter is more popular with Argentinians than foreign visitors, but the quaint towns of Junín de los Andes, San Martín de los Andes and Villa La Angostura are good bases for camping, hiking, trout fishing, horse riding and quad biking.
In Italy, small boutique hotels are often on back streets, tucked into forgotten corners of quaint, quiet neighbourhoods.
Compared with Beyoncé's lightning strike release plan, two of 2013's other big pop albums – Katy Perry's Prism and Lady Gaga's ARTPOP – seem ridiculously quaint.
Perhaps when you own the world, the concept of nationalism seems rather quaint.
We didn't have time to look for the novelist's villa in Anacapri, but we did have lunch - a buffet of tasty antipasti - at his favourite restaurant, Gemma, in Capri Town, which is reached by a quaint, crooked alley bored through the rock, and where his photograph is proudly displayed, pasted to the ceiling of the tiny lobby along with those of many other celebrities.
The term sounds quaint to 21st-century ears: the committee is so big that it has to meet in a cinema.
"Isn't it quaint?" one of them says.
