The Marriage of Quasimodo — The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Quasimodo disappears from Notre-Dame on the day the gypsy and the archdeacon die, and no one sees him again. That night the night men take la Esmeralda's body from the gibbet and carry it, by custom, to the cellar of Montfaucon. The old gallows stands outside Paris, between the Temple and Saint Martin, on a low hill. Pillars, chains, and skeletons crown a stone mass, with crows always overhead and a barred charnel house below. The beams are worm-eaten, the chains rusted, and grass grows on the platform where no one walks.

About eighteen months or two years later, searchers enter that cavern for the body of Olivier le Daim, who has just been hanged. Among the carcasses they find two skeletons, one clasping the other. The woman still has strips of white cloth, a string of adrézarach beads, and a little silk bag with green glass, open and empty. The man who holds her has a crooked spine, his head on his shoulder blades, and one leg shorter than the other. His neck was never broken by a rope. He came there and died there. When they try to pull the skeletons apart, he falls to dust.