Vichy has been a spa town since Roman times, and it still wears the elegance of its glory days in the nineteenth century, when emperors and aristocrats came to take the waters. Napoleon III visited several times in the 1860s and had a row of chalets built for his use by the river Allier, and his patronage made the town fashionable. Wide avenues lined with plane trees, a grand opera house of 1901, covered galleries and a park of springs recall that age. In the Hall des Sources, visitors can still fill a glass at the fountains and taste the mineral waters, which are fizzy, salty and warm.
The name carries other associations. In 1940, after the fall of France, the government of Marshal Pétain made its seat in Vichy's hotels, and the town gave its name to the collaborationist regime of the following four years, a dark chapter that the town now acknowledges in its museum and public life. Today it is a calm, green place, a bit sleepy in winter, famous for its pastilles, little mint-flavoured sweets first made in 1825, and for the cosmetics industry that grew from its waters.
Riding around Vichy is easy. The Allier valley is flat and wide, and the roads along it are smooth and quick, with the hills of the Bourbonnais to the east and the volcanic chain of the Auvergne rising to the west. Cusset, next door, has a medieval centre with a clock tower, and the little villages beyond have châteaux and Romanesque churches. The town has twenty-seven thousand people, so fuel stations and supermarkets are on every approach, and the cafés and brasseries in the centre stay open late. In the old thermal quarter, parking is straightforward and the pavements are wide enough to wander.
The ride from Clermont-Ferrand brings you through fields of sunflowers and wheat, and it is a pleasant change from the volcanic puys. Spring and early autumn are the best seasons, when the plane trees are in leaf and the crowds are thin. Buy a tin of pastilles, sit under the covered gallery with a coffee, and imagine the carriages arriving in the evening.