Unnamed Frenchman

Described in Faulkner's fiction as one of the first white settlers in Yoknapatawpha, the man other people in Yoknapatawpha called the "Frenchman" created a large-scale cotton plantation in the southern part of Yoknapatawpha sometime around 1830-1840, confirming Horace's date when he refers to "that old Frenchman that built the house a hundred years ago" (110). But "Hand Upon the Waters" (1939) Faulkner gives him a name (Louis Grenier) and a specific history as a "Frenchman," although in other texts Faulkner writes that this foreigner may not have actually have been from France. He never explains how or why his plantation failed at some point after the Civil War.