Actually rather amusing up to now, rather like Dickens, the funny stops with a few remarks that, in French, might have been Zola.
The House of the Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851, B&N Classics, 2007.
Page 106.
Phoebe has just met Judge Pyncheon.
She notes his "hard, cold, relentless" look, by which he resembles his long dead ancestor of the same name, the man who built the house on stolen land, and wonders if it is his settled character, inherited.
Hawthorne intrudes, commenting this realization implies a hereditary transmission of "criminal tendencies" and "moral defects" more certain than the hereditary transmission of wealth and property according to law.
Not funny.
Character is destiny, said Heraclitus and Schopenhauer.
A remark of which Sheriff Longmire's libertarian interpretation the other night could not have been more absurd.
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