Louis Grenier is a fictional character in

William Faulkner William Cuthbert Faulkner (; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most o ...

's novels and stories. Grenier (died 1837), a French

Huguenot The Huguenots ( , also , ) were a religious group of French Protestants who held to the Reformed, or Calvinist, tradition of Protestantism. The term, which may be derived from the name of a Swiss political leader, the Genevan burgomaster Be ...

architect and dilettante came, around 1800, with Dr. Samuel Habersham and Alexander Holston to the

settlement Settlement may refer to: *Human settlement, a community where people live *Settlement (structural), the distortion or disruption of parts of a building * Closing (real estate), the final step in executing a real estate transaction *Settlement (fin ...

which would later become Jefferson. Grenier was a student at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf. He bought land in the southeastern part of

Yoknapatawpha County Yoknapatawpha County () is a fictional Mississippi county created by the American author William Faulkner, largely based upon and inspired by Lafayette County, Mississippi, and its county seat of Oxford (which Faulkner renamed "Jefferson"). Faul ...

and established the first

cotton Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus '' Gossypium'' in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor pe ...

plantation and had the first slaves in that part of the state. His slaves straightened a nearly ten-mile stretch of the Yoknapatawpha River to prevent

flooding A flood is an overflow of water ( or rarely other fluids) that submerges land that is usually dry. In the sense of "flowing water", the word may also be applied to the inflow of the tide. Floods are an area of study of the discipline hydrolog ...

, according to ''The Hamlet''. His house later became known as the Old Frenchman's Place, and the small settlement as Frenchman's Bend. His last living descendant was known as
Lonnie Grinnup
, a feeble-minded man in his middle thirties sometime around the first quarter of the twentieth century, although his real name was the same as that of his first Yoknapatawpha County ancestor. Louis Grenier appears in ''Requiem for a Nun'' and is referred to in ''Intruder in the Dust'', ''Hand Upon the Waters'', ''The Town'', and ''The Reivers''. In addition, a character named "Grenier Weddel" appears in ''The Town''.

References

* Grenier, Louis Fictional architects Fictional French people in literature {{novel-char-stub