Mrs. Flem Snopes

Never given a first or maiden name in this story, Flem's wife was "the belle of the countryside" when they married (149). As her story is told in the short story "Spotted Horses" (1931) and retold with much more attention to her character in The Hamlet (1940), Eula Varner became Mrs. Flem Snopes when she became pregnant with another man's child; in return, her father gave him the Old Frenchman place as "a portion of [her] dowry" (150). After an extended honeymoon in Texas, surely timed to mask the date of the child's birth, the couple moves to Jefferson and takes over V.K. Ratliff's restaurant. In "Centaur in Brass," Mrs. Snopes plays a minor role as she "helped in the restaurant at first" (150). She is still "young, with the rich coloring of a calendar" and "something of that vast, serene, impervious beauty of a snowclad virgin mountain flank" (150-51). According to town gossip, she and Mayor Hoxey have an affair that leads to "her husband's rise in Hoxey's administration" (151). This relationship prefigures Eula's affair with Manfred de Spain in the Snopes trilogy.