Leaving Lutetia's (Roman Paris') main north–south thoroughfare just below the Petit-Pont, it turned south to become a roadway parallel to the first known as the via inferior ("lower road").

[1] In 1800, Joseph Fouché, the Parisian chief of police, supposedly documented a series of murders undertaken by a barber and baker on this street.

They are often cited as the first serial killers, and also it is argued that the pair were a significant influence in the famous story of the barber Sweeney Todd of Fleet Street, London, and his baker accomplice Mrs.

The story was then taken up by the English writer Thomas Peckett Prest as The String of Pearls in 1846, and was dramatized by George Dibdin-Pitt the following year.

The earliest version of the story claims "This case was of so terrific a nature, it was made part of the sentence of the law, that besides the execution of the monsters upon the rack, the houses in which they perpetrated those infernal deeds, should be pulled down, and that the spot on which they stood should be marked out to posterity with horror and execration."