Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux, a 15-year-old from Rambouillet, south-west of Paris told the Associated Press (AP) news agency that he had planned to visit the Louvre with his family but found the museum was closed.
“We didn’t know there was a heist,” he said.
As he asked officers about the closure, an AP photographer seeking to capture the security cordon took a picture and included Pedro in the frame.
Pedro only realised the photo had gone viral four days later, when a friend sent him a screenshot asking: “Is that you?”
When he replied that it was, the friend said he had five million views on TikTok. “I was a bit surprised,” Pedro told the AP.
He was even more shocked when his mother called to say the picture had appeared in The New York Times. It made a big impact on him, he said, because he reads that newspaper and “it’s not every day you’re in the New York Times”.
“People said, ‘You’ve become a star’. I was astonished that just with one photo you can become viral in a few days.”
Asked why he wore an old-fashioned waistcoat and a fedora to the museum, Pedro said he began dressing this way recently, inspired by 20th-century statesmen and fictional detectives.
“I like to be chic,” he told the AP. “I go to school like this.”
As wild speculation about the photo of him circulated online – some wondered whether he might be a real detective or an AI fake – Pedro remained silent for weeks.
“I didn’t want to say immediately it was me,” he said. “With this photo there is a mystery, so you have to make it last.”
