In his account of the role the nation's "mid-continent fluvial" rivers played in its historical development, the narrator of Requiem for a Nun claims that Pittsburgh (on the Ohio River) and "Fort Bridger, Wyoming, were suburbs one to the other" (83) - connected by the various waterways that drained into the Mississippi River. In fact, however, Fort Bridger - a stopping point on the Oregon Trail - was on the far side of the Continental Divide; its water flowed to the Pacific, not the Gulf of Mexico.
Founded in 1819 on the banks of the Mississippi River, Memphis, Tennessee, is the closest big city to Jefferson and it appears in almost half the 69 Yoknapatawpha fictions. In Requiem it is from "the Memphis airport" that Temple and her family fly to California (44). Much more importantly, the story that Temple is so reluctant to tell mostly takes place in seamier parts of Memphis, in the "Manuel Street sporting house" (i.e. house of prostitution, 111), "the back alleys of the redlight district" (113), and Popeye's "nightclub, joint, on the outskirts of town" (114).
Cap Ferrat (Cape Ferrat) - where Temple and Gowan spend their honeymoon in a villa built by a prince for his mistress - is a very exclusive community on the Mediterranean in the south of France.
Two French locations that were prominent parts of the history of the Second World War are referred to in the novel. "Dunquerque" (more commonly anglicized as Dunkirk) was the coastal city in northern France from which England had to evacuate its army after German forces overran the country in May 1940, near the start of the War (193). "Utah Beach" was the code name that the Allies gave to the westernmost of the five Normandy beaches where the D-Day invasion of occupied France began on 6 June 1944 (193).
"The Western Front" refers to the battle line across which the German and the allied armies faced each other for most of World War I; the experiences of a "combat airman" like young Bayard Sartoris in the War are described in detail in several other Yoknapatawpha fictions (190).
Temple spends a "year in Europe, Paris," and she and Gowan are married at the American Embassy there (121). The Crillon, where their reception is held, a luxury hotel which opened in Paris in 1909. The palace at Versailles, near Paris, is also mentioned in the novel as a facetious standard of comparison for the massive house that the "Paris architect" builds for Sutpen (32).
The language spoken by the slaves that Sutpen brings to Yoknapatawpha is identified by Compson as "the Caribbean-Spanish-French of the Sugar Islands" (30). Better known as the West Indies, the islands of the Caribbean used slave labor to produce most the world's sugar at the time Yoknapatawpha was settled.
The Mississippi River and the towns that grew up along its banks - "St Louis, Paducah, Memphis, Helena, Vicksburg, Natchez, Baton Rouge" (82) - appears in the novel as a major element in the historical story that Yoknapatawpha is part of. The antebellum era as a "new age" for the nation flows through the "vast single net of commerce webbed and veined [by the waters of] the mid-continent's fluvial embracement" (83). Jefferson lies "about midway between" the River and the Natchez Trace (6).
On their trip from Jefferson to Jackson, Gavin and Temple stop at a "filling station" (162), which we would call a gas station. Gavin tells her they need to "change the wheel," but the real purpose of the stop is to give Gowan time to get to Jackson ahead of them (163).
