France (Location Key)

Although Faulkner himself never got to the Western Front during World War I, quite a few of his characters fight or serve as non-combatants in wartime France; France during the wars of the 20th century has separate Location entries. After they are marrried in Paris in Requiem for a Nun Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens honeymoon at Cap Ferrat (Cape Ferrat), a very exclusive community on the Mediterranean in the south of France, in a villa built by a prince for his mistress. Perhaps the most unlikely Yoknapatawphan to visit France is Issetibbeha, the Chickasaw chief; when he returns to Yoknapatawpha, he brings back some of the cast-offs of European culture: a gilt bed, a pair of girandoles reputedly owned by the mistress of King Louis XV, and a pair of slippers with red heels that plays an important role in the politics of the tribe (320). Similarly, but presumably with a less satiric tone, the "Appendix" says that much of the furniture inside the original Compson mansion was imported from France (328). In that "Appendix" Faulkner brings the story of Caddy Compson to an ambiguous anti-climax in France. Her last known address is in Paris, from which she "vanishes" during World War II, "with the German occupation" of the city in 1940 (332). But sometime during that war the county librarian finds a photograph in "a slick magazine" that she is sure shows Caddy in an expensive car beside "a German staffgeneral" in Cannebiere (334). Cannebiere is the name of a historic street in the old quarter of Marseilles, a city on the southern coast of France about 130 miles from Cap Ferrat. It's also almost 500 miles from that bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, where Temple's face looked "sullen and discounted and sad" at the end of Sanctuary. If that is Caddy in the photo, her face is "cold serene and damned." (See also the entry for "Paris, France" in this index.)