On my way to the Pyrenees last September, I flew to Marseilles (the most crime-ridden city in Europe) to visit my first cousin, Bruce, who is an expatriate and has lived abroad all of his adult life – first as a petroleum engineer, second as an executive for a company running a worldwide chain of shoe-repair shops, and finally as an auditor for a hotel in Nîmes, in the Languedoc, to which he commuted by train from his wife’s ancestral home in Alès.
