Old Frenchman

The man who built "the Old Frenchman's place" as one of the earliest plantations in Yoknapatawpha history is not named in this story; in other texts he is identified as Louis Grenier. It is from him that the Frenchman's Bend area of the county gets its name, and he owned enough slaves to "straighten the river bed" past his "four thousand acres" of land (136), but he himself never appears directly in any Faulkner text, and although two late novels mention that a descendant of his, named Grinnup, still lives in the area of the plantation, after the Civil War the family seems to have essentially disappeared.