Unnamed Three Frenchmen
Character Key Number:
3200
Display Name:
Unnamed Three Frenchmen
Sort Name:
Unnamed Three Frenchmen
Ever Present in Yoknapatawpha?:
No
Biography:
One of the "three Frenchmen" mentioned in Requiem for a Nun traveling down the Mississippi River in "a Chippeway canoe" is almost certainly René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the 17th-century French explorer credited with discovering the river and claiming it and all the territory it drained for France (81). But it's not clear why Faulkner associates him specifically with two other Frenchmen. The actual party of Frenchmen and French-Canadians who, along with a group of Canadian Indians, traveled downriver to the Gulf of Mexico in 1682-1683 was much larger.