Frenchman's Bend in Intruder in the Dust (Location)

This area southeast of Jefferson is one of Faulkner's favorite Yoknapatawpha locations. In this larger context Frenchman's Bend is best known as the site from which Flem Snopes and his kinfolk launch their assault on Jefferson. In this novel it appears by name only as the setting for an anecdote about how well Sheriff Hampton's handles a feud between "a Frenchman's Bend lady" and "another lady"; the larger Faulknerian context reinforces the idea that the use of "lady" here is sarcastic (227) - the "other lady's" husband is a moonshiner. But an earlier passage not only refers to Frenchman's Bend; it explains the origins of the region's name when it recalls "Louis Grenier, the elegant, the dilettante, the Paris-educated architect" who built the antebellum slave plantation on the banks of the Yoknapatawpha river that is still referred to as "the old Frenchman place" in other fictions (74).