I recently returned to Marseille for the first time in over four decades, and came away wondering how I could have waited so long to go back.

My first visit was an odd stroke of luck. When I was a socially dysfunctional, meagerly put-together high school student, I won an essay contest sponsored by the executive club of American Export Lines. Today any thought of my juvenile take on "American Shipping in Today's World" makes me wince, but in 1962 my composition satisfied judges who awarded me a summer aboard a freighter bound for ten European ports of call.

For many people, both French and foreign, something uncomfortable lurks in the name Vichy.

Vichy calls to mind first and foremost the provisional French government of the years 1940-1944 that collaborated with the Nazi Germany occupation of France. Or as an American I met upon returning to Paris from a two-day stay in the town Vichy put it, “Didn’t something bad happen there?”