If you run the following sequence: stty -echoctl # don't translate control characters to ^C sleep 600 and then interrupt that with ctrl+C The terminal prints character \x03 if the font happens to include it (a strange blob, usually). This undesirable behaviour is not present in the linux console, xterm or KDE konsole, which suppress control characters in the font.
Mainstream vte bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=403130
This is a vte issue, not xfce4-terminal. The issue is still there in vte3 0.44.2, however.