Le Cousin Pons

is traced back to its antecedent, the axiomatic you only live once (first used in a nineteenth-century English translation of Balzac) […].

Or, comme les salaires de Cibot produisaient environ sept à huit cent francs en moyenne par an, les époux se faisaient, avec leurs étrennes, un revenu de seize cent francs, à la lettre mangés par les Cibot qui vivaient mieux que ne vivent les gens du peuple. « On ne vit qu'une fois ! » disait la Cibot.

The Government sent Sylvain Pons to Rome to make a great musician of himself; and in Rome Sylvain Pons acquired a taste for the antique and works of art. He became an admirable judge of those masterpieces of the brain and hand which are summed up by the useful neologism “bric-a-brac;” and when the child of Euterpe returned to Paris somewhere about the year 1810, it was in the character of a rabid collector, loaded with pictures, statuettes, frames, wood-carving, ivories, enamels, porcelains, and the like. He had sunk the greater part of his patrimony, not so much in the purchases themselves as on the expenses of transit; and every penny inherited from his mother had been spent in the course of a three-years’ travel in Italy after the residence in Rome came to an end. He had seen Venice, Milan, Florence, Bologna, and Naples leisurely, as he wished to see them, as a dreamer of dreams, and a philosopher; careless of the future, for an artist looks to his talent for support as the fille de joie counts upon her beauty.