Chevalier Soeur-Blonde de Vitry

Though he is mentioned in six fictions, this Frenchman remains a shadowy figure. When he first appears, during Ikkemotubbe's trip to New Orleans in "Red Leaves," the narrator notes that his "social position" is "equivocal" (317). Chevaliers were minor nobles in pre-Revolutionary France. This "Chevalier" has emigrated from Paris to the French colony of Louisiana, though two of the stories also show him back in France as an old man. Thematically he may represent the frontier world out of which Yoknapatawpha emerged, with its blend of frontier raggedness and aristocratic pretensions, but his main role in the fictions is as the source of Ikkemotubbe's subriquet: De Vitry calls him "du homme," the Man, after the name of the tribal chief, and this nickname morphs into "Doom."