Two Metres of Bronze, One Pink Tutu

Outside the Athénée de Luxembourg a bronze young man holds a torch over his head and looks into the middle distance, serious and entirely undressed. Generations of pupils have called him Datzemisch. He looks like a boy who has never left his gym kit on a bus.

In 2009, on the eve of the leaving exams, a group of final-year pupils decided what he lacked was a pink tutu.

I have read about this with the special attention of a parent whose eldest is in the year before his own finals. I am at the stage where I check that he has slept. The idea that a reasonable revision plan could include a night operation on a plinth had not occurred to me, and now cannot be removed.

Consider the logistics, because they did. A tutu for a two-metre bronze is not a costume-shop item. It has to be pink, and large, and fit round a figure with one arm permanently in the air. Somebody has to make it, somebody has to carry it, and somebody has to get up there in the dark with it, the night before a written paper, when everyone sensible is asleep and everyone else is pretending to read Goethe.

The tape measure in our kitchen drawer has never once been asked for the waist of a statue, and I intend to keep it that way.

They got it on. In the morning Datzemisch was holding his torch over a cloud of pink net, as serious as ever, and the school walked in past him to sit its exams.

This is the part that unsettles me most. Nothing bad happened. The pupils went in and wrote their papers. The statue held its pose. The results arrived in the summer, in the ordinary way. It is possible, I now have to accept, to dress a monument the night before your finals and pass them.

I mentioned this at dinner as a curiosity. The eldest put down his fork and asked whether the statue outside the Brussels conservatoire was bronze or stone, and how tall it was, and whether I happened to know what time the caretaker locked up.

I said it was a cautionary tale. He said it sounded like a precedent.

I have hidden the tape measure. My husband has hidden the pink net from the youngest’s ballet costume. We are both sleeping with our trainers on.