[Illustration:  Fig. 349.—­The Gibbet of Montfaucon.—­From an Engraving of the Topography of Paris, in the Collection of Engravings of the National Library.]

According to prescribed rule, the gallows of Paris, which played such an important part in the political as well as the criminal history of that city, were erected on a height north of the town, near the high road leading into Germany.  Montfaucon, originally the name of the hill, soon became that of the gallows itself.  This celebrated place of execution consisted of a heavy mass of masonry, composed of ten or twelve layers of rough stones, and formed an enclosure of forty feet by twenty-five or thirty.  At the upper part there was a platform, which was reached by a stone staircase, the entrance to which was closed by a massive door (Fig. 349).  On three sides of this platform rested sixteen square pillars, about thirty feet high, made of blocks of stone a foot thick.  These pillars were joined to one another by double bars of wood, which were fastened into them, and bore iron chains three feet and a half long, to which the criminals were suspended.  Underneath, half-way between these and the platform, other bars were placed for the same purpose.  Long and solid ladders riveted to the pillars enabled the executioner and his assistants to lead up criminals, or to carry up corpses destined to be hung there.  Lastly, the centre of the structure was occupied by a deep pit, the hideous receptacle of the decaying remains of the criminals.

One can easily imagine the strange and melancholy aspect of this monumental gibbet if one thinks of the number of corpses continually attached to it, and which were feasted upon by thousands of crows.  On one occasion only it was necessary to replace fifty-two chains, which were useless; and the accounts of the city of Paris prove that the expense of executions was more heavy than that of the maintenance of the gibbet, a fact easy to be understood if one recalls to mind the frequency of capital sentences during the Middle Ages.  Montfaucon was used not only for executions, but also for exposing corpses which were brought there from various places of execution in every part of the country.  The mutilated remains of criminals who had been boiled, quartered, or beheaded, were also hung there, enclosed in sacks of leather or wickerwork.  They often remained hanging for a considerable time, as in the case of Pierre des Essarts, who had been beheaded in 1413, and whose remains were handed over to his family for Christian burial after having hung on Montfaucon for three years.