We have just said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre-
Dame on the day of the gypsy's and of the archdeacon's death.
He was not seen again, in fact; no one knew what had become
of him.
During the night which followed the execution of la
Esmeralda, the night men had detached her body from the
gibbet, and had carried it, according to custom, to the
cellar of Montfau?on.
Montfau?on was, as Sauval says, "the most ancient and the
most superb gibbet in the kingdom." Between the faubourgs
of the Temple and Saint Martin, about a hundred and sixty
toises from the walls of Paris, a few bow shots from La
Courtille, there was to be seen on the crest of a gentle,
almost imperceptible eminence, but sufficiently elevated to
be seen for several leagues round about, an edifice of strange
form, bearing considerable resemblance to a Celtic cromlech, and
where also human sacrifices were offered.
Let the reader picture to himself, crowning a limestone hillock,
an oblong mass of masonry fifteen feet in height, thirty wide,
forty long, with a gate, an external railing and a platform;
on this platform sixteen enormous pillars of rough hewn stone,
thirty feet in height, arranged in a colonnade round three of
the four sides of the mass which support them, bound together
at their summits by heavy beams, whence hung chains at intervals;
on all these chains, skeletons; in the vicinity, on the plain,
a stone cross and two gibbets of secondary importance, which
seemed to have sprung up as shoots around the central gallows;
above all this, in the sky, a perpetual flock of crows; that
was Montfau?on.
At the end of the fifteenth century, the formidable gibbet
which dated from 1328, was already very much dilapidated;
the beams were wormeaten, the chains rusted, the pillars
green with mould; the layers of hewn stone were all cracked
at their joints, and grass was growing on that platform which
no feet touched. The monument made a horrible profile
against the sky; especially at night when there was a little
moonlight on those white skulls, or when the breeze of evening
brushed the chains and the skeletons, and swayed all these
in the darkness. The presence of this gibbet sufficed to
render gloomy all the surrounding places.
The mass of masonry which served as foundation to the
odious edifice was hollow. A huge cellar had been
constructed there, closed by an old iron grating, which
was out of order, into which were cast not only the human
remains, which were taken from the chains of Montfau?on, but
also the bodies of all the unfortunates executed on the other
permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep charnel-house, where
so many human remains and so many crimes have rotted in company,
many great ones of this world, many innocent people, have
contributed their bones, from Enguerrand de Marigni, the first
victim, and a just man, to Admiral de Coligni, who was its last,
and who was also a just man.
As for the mysterious disappearance of Quasimodo, this is all
that we have been able to discover.
About eighteen months or two years after the events which
terminate this story, when search was made in that cavern for
the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days
previously, and to whom Charles VIII. had granted the favor
of being buried in Saint Laurent, in better company, they
found among all those hideous carcasses two skeletons, one
of which held the other in its embrace. One of these skeletons,
which was that of a woman, still had a few strips of a
garment which had once been white, and around her neck was
to be seen a string of adr¨¦zarach beads with a little silk bag
ornamented with green glass, which was open and empty.
These objects were of so little value that the executioner had
probably not cared for them. The other, which held this one
in a close embrace, was the skeleton of a man. It was noticed
that his spinal column was crooked, his head seated on his
shoulder blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other.
Moreover, there was no fracture of the vertebrae at the nape
of the neck, and it was evident that he had not been hanged.
Hence, the man to whom it had belonged had come thither
and had died there. When they tried to detach the skeleton
which he held in his embrace, he fell to dust.
NOTE