In the Shadow of Notre Dame

by M.P. Pellicer | Stranger Than Fiction Stories
Most people are familiar with Victor Hugo's masterpiece The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, but how much of this story is fictional or perhaps true?

---

Victor Hugo c.1837

Various movie versions have been made of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, one of the most famous is the 1939 film in which Charles Laughton plays Quasimodo.

Contrary to the stories appearing on film, in Hugo's novel Quasimodo is a gypsy changeling who is exorcised, and then left as a deformed foundling at Notre-Dame. The gypsy Esmeralda is ultimately executed by hanging at Montfaucon, Paris' most famous gibbet, which was usually covered in carrion crows who pecked at the various corpses left there to rot.

In 1999, the discovery of a diary in Cornwall appears to reveal the real-life inspiration behind the character of Quasimodo the deaf bell-ringer of Notre Dame, and his unrequited love for Esmeralda who fascinated her fellow Parisians with her gypsy dance.

Clues suggesting that Quasimodo is based on a historical figure were uncovered in the memoirs of Henry Sibson (1795-1870) a 19th-century British sculptor, who was employed at the cathedral around the time the book was written, and who describes a hunched back stonemason also working there. Sibson wrote his memoirs when he was in his 70s, and he recalled the time period as 1820-21. The sculptors and carvers mentioned would have been working in an atelier attached to L’École des Beaux Arts located in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. During 1820, Victor Hugo was known to have lived in the 6th arrondissement.
​
The documents were acquired by the Tate Archive in 1999, after they were discovered in the attic of a house in Penzance, Cornwall as the owner prepared to move out. They are comprised of 7 volumes covering the time Sibson worked on repairs to Notre Dame Cathedral in the 1820s. In one entry he writes:

---

the (French) government had given orders for the repairing of the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Paris and it was now in progress. I was employed to carve the foliage round the windows under two contractors, Plantor and Fontaine.

I applied at the Government studios, where they were executing the large figures and here I met with a M. Trajan, a most worthy, fatherly and amiable man as ever existed – he was the carver under the Government sculptor whose name I forget as I had no intercourse with him, all that I know is that he was humpbacked and he did not like to mix with carvers.

At length the time came to go to Dreux. M Le Bossu (the Hunchback) a nickname given to him and I scarcely ever heard any other and M Trajan, the Chief of the gang for there were a number of us. M. Le Bossu was pleased to tell M. Trajan that he must be sure to take the little Englishman.

Laughton as the Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1939: The hunchback and the nineteenth-century gargoyles

Later Sibson worked on another project outside of Paris where he makes mention of “Mon. Le Bossu,” which translates in French to hunchback.

​He wrote: "Mon Le Bossu (the Hunchback) a nickname given to him and I scarcely ever heard any other ... the Chief of the gang for there were a number of us, M. Le Bossu was pleased to tell Mon. Trajan that he must be sure to take the little Englishman."

Adrian Glew, who made the discovery, said: "When I saw the references to the humpbacked sculptor at Notre Dame, and saw that the dates matched the time of Hugo's interest in the Cathedral, the hairs on the back of my neck rose and I thought I should look into it."

Hugo who hoped to bring attention to the repairs needed at the cathedral, started writing The Hunch Back of Notre Dame in 1828, and published it in 1831. It made him one of the most acclaimed authors in France. The much needed restoration of the structure commenced in 1844, since the cathedral had suffered during the radical phase of the French revolution in the 1790s.
​
There is reason to believe that Hugo knew who Trajan and Le Bossu were. In the Almanach de Paris dating to 1833, it lists a sculptor named "Trajin" living in Saint Germain-des-Pres, where the author lived as well.

In an early draft of Les Misérables, the character “Jean Valjean” was originally named “Jean Trejean.” Hugo changed the name later.

Gerry Croydon, a distant relative of Sibson's, said:

---

Henry's diaries are fascinating, as he traveled the length and breadth of Europe and came across some amazing characters. The discovery that his diary may reveal the inspiration behind one of literature's great characters, is quite amazing.

Gibbet of Montfaucon (1856) by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc

THE HAUNTING OF MONTFAUCON
Even though the story of the unfortunate Quasimodo is fictional, the existence of the gibbet Montfaucon and the land it stood upon is not.

In an area that was once part of the countryside outside the medieval walls of Paris is the address 53 Rue de la Grange aux Belles. Standing there you would have had a good view of the city, since it's situated on an elevated mound. The area now called Montmartre would have been visible towards the northwest. Close by would have been the leper colony of St. Lazare, the Convent of the Filles-Dieu (a home for prostitutes), and it was just north of the original Hôspital Saint-Louis. Clearly, the king did not want any undesirable elements within the walls of his city.

---

ocated in northeastern Paris, Parc de Buttes Chaumont, the fifth opened in 1867. Beautiful as it is, the park sits on some seriously sinister ground. It was the location of the Gallows of Montfaucon, where people were hanged in groups and left to disintegrate before being buried below the gallows.

It was here that the Montfaucon Gallows was erected around the late 13th century, and was used until 1629 and finally dismantled in 1760. The structure was used to hang people and to display the bodies of the executed, sometimes for as long as three years. The bodies stank so badly that when the wind blew from the northeast, the smell could be discerned in what was the far off city at that time.

There are various areas nearby cited as the original location of the Gibet de Montfaucon, such as the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont or the area bounded by Avenue Secrétan and Rue de Meaux.

In 1954, the construction of the garage at Rue de la Grange aux Belles, revealed the bases of two stone pillars and human bones. It was believed these were remains from the charnel house that sat underneath the gibbet, and that this was evidence enough to support the location of Gibet de Montfaucon. 

It is said that if you stand near 53 Rue de la Grange aux Belles late at night and listen carefully, you will hear the rattle of chains and the moans of the gibbet's victims.

---

Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, in the 1923 film, The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

THE MARRIAGE OF QUASIMODO
We have already said that Quasimodo disappeared from Notre Dame on the day of the death of the gypsy 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'.

It was 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.   

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 mold, 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 profile of this edifice upon the sky was a horrible one, especially at night, when the faint moonlight fell upon those bleached skulls, or when the night breeze, shaking the chains and the skeletons, made them rattle in the dark. The presence of this gibbet was sufficient to induce a belief that all environs were haunted. 

The mass of masonry that formed the base of the repulsive edifice was hollow, and an immense cavern had been constructed in it, closed by an old battered iron grating, into which were thrown not only the human relics that fell from the chains of Montfaucon itself, but also the bodies of the victims of all the other permanent gibbets of Paris. To that deep charnel-house, where so many human remains and the memory of so many crimes have rotted and mingled together, many a great one of the earth, and many an innocent victim have contributed their bones.

As for Quasimodo’s mysterious disappearance, all that we have been able to ascertain on the subject is this:   

About a year and a half or two years after the concluding events of this story, when search was being made in the pit of Montfaucon for the body of Olivier le Daim, who had been hanged two days before, and to whom Charles VIII granted the favor of being interred at Saint-Laurent in better company, there were found among these hideous carcasses two skeletons, the one clasped in the arms of the other.

​One of these skeletons, which was that of a woman, had still about it some tattered remnants of a garment that had once been white, and about its neck was a string of beads together with a small silken bag ornamented with green glass, but open and empty. These objects had been of so little value that the executioner, doubtless, had scorned to take them. The other skeleton, which held this one in so close a clasp, was that of a man. It was observed that the spine was crooked, the skull compressed between the shoulder-blades, and that one leg was shorter than the other. There was no rupture of the vertebrae at the nape of the neck, from which it was evident that the man had not been hanged. He must, therefore, have come of himself and died there. 

When they attempted to detach this skeleton from the one it was embracing, it fell to dust. — The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo ​