Old Frenchman

One of the original white settlers of the region, the Old Frenchman brought “his family and slaves” (4) to Yoknapatawpha and “hewed” a “tremendous plantation” out of the “cane-and-cypress jungle” (3). In the later novels Intruder in the Dust (1948) and The Reivers (1962), Faulkner calls this settler the Huguenot Louis Grenier and relates how he came to Mississippi in the 1790’s to establish and name Jefferson. As with a number of the plantation families in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha narratives, his dynastic ambitions cannot be sustained. When The Hamlet begins about a generation after his death, the "Old Frenchman" is a man whose very “name was forgotten” and “had quite possibly been a foreigner,” but even this detail remains unclear since “the people who came after him . . . had almost obliterated all trace of his sojourn” (4). Accordingly, all that remains of him is “the river bed which his slaves had straightened,” the “skeleton of the tremendous house,” and the “stubborn tale of the money he buried somewhere about the place” during the Civil War.