Notre Dame de Paris - Bartleby.com

It was for this reason the Archdeacon was denied Christian burial.
Louis XI died the following year, in August, 1483.
As for Pierre Gringoire, he not only succeeded in saving the goat, but gained considerable success as a
writer of tragedies. It appears that after dabbling in astronomy, philosophy, architecture, hermetics—in
short, every variety of craze—he returned to tragedy, which is the craziest of the lot. This is what he
called “coming to a tragic end.” Touching his dramatic triumphs, we read in the royal privy accounts
for 1483:
“To Jehan Marchand and Pierre Gringoire, carpenter and composer, for making and composing the
Mystery performed at the Châtelet of Paris on the day of the entry of Monsieur the Legate; for duly
ordering the characters, with properties and habiliments proper to the said Mystery, as likewise for
constructing the wooden stages necessary for the same: one hundred livres.”
Phœbus de Châteaupers also came to a tragic end—he married.
IV. The Marriage of Quasimodo
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.
By the end of the fifteenth century, this formidable gibbet, which had stood since 1328, had fallen upon
evil days. The beams were worm-eaten, the chains corroded with rust, the pillars green with mould, the
blocks of hewn stone gaped away from one another, and grass was growing on the platform on which no
human foot ever trod now. The structure showed a ghastly silhouette against the sky—especially at night,
when the moonlight gleamed on whitened skulls, and the evening breeze, sweeping through the chains
and skeletons, set them rattling in the gloom. The presence of this gibbet sufficed to cast a blight over
every spot within the range of its accursed view.