Etienne Roulet

Etienne Roulet is a fictional character in H. P. Lovecraft's short story "The Shunned House". It is suggested in the story that he is a relative of the historical figure Jacques Roulet, who was tried as a werewolf in France in 1598.
The story relates that Etienne Roulet and his wife had moved to from Caude in France to East Greenwich, Rhode Island, in 1686, "after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes." (The Edict of Nantes, in which King Henry IV granted tolerance to French Protestants in 1598, was repealed by his grandson Louis XIV in 1685, leading to a Protestant exodus from France.)Wikipedia, "Edict of Nantes".
The Roulets were unpopular in East Greenwich, for reasons that rumour said "extended beyond mere racial and national prejudice". Claiming religious persecution, they asked to move to Providence, and despite some hostile whispering, the town fathers allowed them to do so in 1696. Etienne was "given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast’s wharf"--Tillinghast being a historical figure, a successful merchant and a pastor of the Baptist Church of Providence.Wikipedia, "Pardon Tillinghast".
In 1697, the family leased a small tract of land, where they built a one-story cottage with an attic. Behind it they laid out a graveyard--on land that later became the site of the Shunned House. The narrator notes that "no record of any transfer of graves existed."
Etienne Roulet is described as "swarthy"--almost always a red flag in a Lovecraft story--and "less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams." The entire family is said to have "possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity—dark spheres which for normal folk hold only repulsion and terror." But the worst of them was said to be Etienne's son Paul.
== References ==
Category:Humans
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works