House-hunting is at the best of times an experience rivalling divorce and map-reading as one of the most hellish the average European can go through; house-hunting in a foreign language is that much harder. We’re looking for an apartment in Paris. In spite of reports informing us that the price of property has dropped or, at least, frozen, prices here seem to rise every few seconds. Hideous, dark, minuscule basement hovels in Montmartre might even inspire a romantic response, as you imagine a thrice-ruined character from Balzac spending his dying months picking at the thin coverlet on his bug-infested mattress, as he waits hopelessly for some uncaring offspring to knock on the rotting wood of the door. But for this, they’re asking €400,000. Why is it that these days the apartment you want, whether you’re in London, Paris or central Texas (where we also live) always costs just that much more than you want to pay? Mind you, given the real fall in property prices and the exchange rate, for the same money in Texas we could probably buy ourselves a good-sized ranch, stocked with a mature herd of longhorns for about half what a two-bedroom apartment in the 15th would cost us.