SnopessInTWQ

"It was those letters," Narcissa tells Virginia Du Pre to explain her trip to Memphis; "don't you remember?" (739). That is, the "anonymous love letters" that she received in Flags in the Dust. In this story she adds that after "that book-keeper in Colonel Sartoris' bank stole that money and ran away," she realized who wrote them. Such a realization doesn't actually occur in the earlier novel, but there there's no mystery for the book's readers about who's writing the letters - it's the Snopes that Faulkner decided to call Byron, whose sordid attempts at romantic poetry are described in some detail by the novel's narrator. Given the ironic aptness of his name, perhaps Faulkner expected that the story's readers might remember it. If not, this is an occasion when a Snopes makes an uncredited appearance in a text.