The events have made of Manneken Pis a legendary brussels figure and a hero which glory has widely spread abroad. A legend says, that a rich bourgeois had lost his only son in the crowd during popular festivities. After five days, he found him at the corner of the Etuve Street, doing what the little man is still doing.

Another legend makes us believe, that a little boy should have saved the city extinguishing, in his manners, the wick with which the enemies wanted to put the city on fire.

It was in 1619 that Jérôme Duquesnoy senior was intrusted by the Brussels taxe collectors to make a statue in bronze of their famous citizen.