We have already said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre-Dame on the day of the death of the gipsy girl and the Archdeacon. He was never seen again, nor was it known what became of him.
In the night following the execution of Esmeralda, the hangman's assistants took down her body from the gibbet and carried it, according to custom, to the great charnel vault of Montfaucon.
Montfaucon, to use the words of Sauval, was "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 wall of Paris and a few bow-shots from La Courtille, there stood on the highest point of a very slight eminence, but high enough to be visible for several leagues round, an edifice of peculiar form, much resembling a Celtic cromlech, and claiming like the cromlech its human sacrifices.
Let the reader imagine a huge oblong mass of masonry fifteen feet high, thirty feet wide, and forty feet long, on a plaster base, with a door, an external railing, and a platform; on this platform sixteen enormous pillars of rough hewn stone, thirty feet high, ranged as a colonnade round three of the four sides of the immense block supporting them, and connected at the top by heavy beams, from which hung chains at regular intervals; at each of these chains, skeletons; close by, in the plain, a stone cross and two secondary gibbets, rising like shoots of the great central tree; in the sky, hovering over the whole, a perpetual crowd of carrion crows. There you have Montfaucon.