Manneken Pis

In Brussels dialect, Manneken Pis means “peeing boy.” Documents do not identify the child for whom this monument was erected: stories about a boy who put out an enemy fuse with his stream belong to legend. Here, at the corner of Rue du Chêne and Rue de l'Étuve, a public drinking fountain stood from the fifteenth century. In sixteen nineteen, the city magistrates commissioned the sculptor Hieronymus Duquesnoy the Elder to make a new bronze figure to refurbish the fountain. Residents came here for water; the boy sent it flowing into the fountain basin. That explains both what he is doing and the spot chosen for him long before tourists appeared.

During the night of October fourth to fifth, eighteen seventeen, Antoine Licas, a thirty-three-year-old building painter who had already been pardoned after an earlier sentence of penal servitude, climbed over the railing. He tore the figurine from its pedestal to sell the bronze to a scrap dealer. Licas smashed it with a hammer and buried the fragments in a vacant lot near the old city wall.

A few days later, police arrested Licas. He confessed and showed them the hiding place. On November fifth, the court sentenced him to penal servitude for life. Before he was sent away on February sixth, eighteen eighteen, he was displayed for an hour at the pillory on Grand-Place and branded on the shoulder with the mark of a convict. His life sentence was later reduced to twenty years. The recovered parts of the figurine were restored, and it was reinstalled above the fountain as early as December sixth.

The theft of a small bronze object was judged so harshly because city residents had long treated the boy as a participant in civic ceremonies. The first known depiction shows him dressed as a shepherd as early as sixteen fifteen. And in seventeen forty-seven, when Brussels was occupied by a French garrison, the soldiers of King Louis XV tried to carry off the figurine. The outrage threatened to lead to a clash with the residents. The French king, wishing to quell the conflict, gave the boy a gentleman's costume embroidered in gold and silver, granted him permission to wear a sword, and bestowed on him the cross of the Order of Saint Louis. This outfit was the first to survive from his entire wardrobe; the worn original is no longer exhibited, and the museum displays an exact copy.

Now, those wishing to give Manneken Pis clothing submit an official application to the city, and the changing of outfits takes place here according to a published schedule. However, it is now a copy that is dressed. In nineteen sixty-five, the restored statue was stolen again; a year later, it was found in the Brussels–Charleroi Canal and moved to the Brussels City Museum on Grand-Place. The figure that Licas smashed to sell the bronze is there; its double sends water into the basin above it.