In 1787, the Duke of Orleans ordered a magnificent service in blue decor from Tournai of which some pieces are held in the Musée royal de Mariemont.

[2] In 1818, Maximilen Joseph de Bettignies, advocate to the council of Tournai, General Counsel and magistrate, opened a depot at rue du Wacq in Saint-Amand-les-Eaux, which he gave to his son Maximilian.

First installed in rue Marion, the factory in 1837 was established at a place called Le Moulin des Loups, on the road to Valenciennes.

In 1833, he married, in Orchies, Adeline Armande Bocquet, who bore him four children, one of whom was Henri, Louise de Bettignies's father.

[a] Despite her father's financial difficulties, de Bettignies obtained a secondary education in Valenciennes with the Sisters of the Sacred Heart.

I saw her most often at Valenciennes, at the house of our common grandmother, [...] Louise was blonde, frail in appearance, with a mobile face and piercing eyes that seemed to dart in all directions ...

She was a boarder with her sister, Germaine, at the Convent of the Holy Union of the Sacred Hearts, where the good nuns fed that lively child opinions that were similar to those of her grandmother.

I still have vivid memories of my cousin from the time we spent at our grandmother's house on rue Capron Street, in Valenciennes ... Louise was then twelve.

On 1 August 1914, Adolphe Messimy, Minister of War, suppressed, with the approval of René Viviani, President of the Council, the position of governor of Lille.

On 22 August, after German patrols were seen in the vicinity of Lille, General Percin installed a 75 mm gun in front of each drawbridge of the Citadel.

On October 9, the commander Felix de Pardieu and his territorials were ordered to retreat in the region of Neuve-Chapelle, leaving Lille without defender.

General Ferdinand Foch, who arrived on the night of 4 to 5 October, warned by the prefect, sent commander Pardieu back towards Lille under the protection of the 20th Regiment of mounted chasseurs.

From 4 to 13 October 1914, by turning the only cannon that the Lille troops had, the defenders succeeded in deceiving the enemy and holding them for several days under an intense battle that destroyed more than 2,200 buildings and houses, particularly in the area of the station.

After the German army invaded Lille in October 1914, de Bettignies began carrying messages from people who were trapped there to and from their relatives in unoccupied France.

She decided to work for the British, who gave her the pseudonym Alice Dubois and helped her set up an intelligence network of some one hundred people.

[14] The network, which operated within forty kilometers of the front to the west and east of Lille, was so effective that she was nicknamed by her English superiors "the queen of spies."

Starting in spring 1915, de Bettignies worked closely with Marie Léonie Vanhoutte, alias Charlotte Lameron.

[14][15][16] De Bettignies smuggled men to England, provided valuable information to the Intelligence Service, and prepared for her superiors in London a grid map of the region around Lille.

When the German army installed a new battery of artillery, the intelligence she provided allowed this camouflaged position to be bombed by the Royal Flying Corps within eight days.

Another opportunity allowed her to report the date and time of passage of the imperial train carrying the Kaiser on a secret visit to the front at Lille.