Grenier Plantation|Old Frenchman Place in Sanctuary (Location)

The narrative describes this antebellum mansion (and gothic setting) twice, when Horace arrives at it in Chapter 1 and again when Temple arrives there in Chapter 5. Both descriptions emphasize the decay of a once prosperous plantation into a kind of haunted house. The first description calls it "a gutted ruin" and the second "a gaunt weather-stained ruin" (8, 41). The first description notes that its "fields and gardens and lawns" have "long since gone back to jungle"; the second says that its setting shows no "sign of husbandry." It's easy to sympathize with Temple's immediate reaction to the sight: "I don't want to go there" (41). In his earliest reference to this location, in the "Father Abraham" manuscript, Faulkner goes into the story of its past as one of Yoknapatawpha's first settlements, and the way it got its name. In Sanctuary it is referred to as "the Old Frenchman place" (105), and Horace refers briefly to "that old Frenchman that built the house a hundred years ago" (110), but that is all we hear about its history. It is not clear who owns it now, or how Lee Goodwin came to be living and making moonshine on the premises. In earlier editions of the novel the place is located "twenty miles from town," but Polk's corrected text puts the distance at "twelve miles" (121).