Lewis, also known as Le Lewis, was the brand of Louis Villemos. An entry on velobase.com claims that the name 'Lewis' was a play on 'Louis'. I think that Louis Villemus was born in Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne, France, the other side of the mountain from Alpe d'Huez, and that he rode in the 1913 and 1914 Tours de France.

I believe that the Lewis business was based in Albertville, also in the French Alps and not so far from Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne. However, Louis Villemos additionally seems to be associated with the Reyhand bicycle brand, based in Lyon, and with a specialist cycle shop (and Reyhand dealer) run by a M. Bernadet in Voiron, near Grenoble. Albertville, Lyon and Voiron are all in the same general part of France, but are some significant distance apart from each other - Louis will have been a busy man travelling between them.

The Lewis product range included a number of well made derailleurs and some innovative and high quality centre-pull and cantilever brakes. Louis Villemus seems to have been able to produce particularly well designed and finished aluminium alloy parts, at a time when the aluminium components of other manufacturers were often rather crude and spurious.

Lewis appears to have been active between about 1934 and the late 1940s. I find it slightly surprising that the company was able to produce a flurry of up-market aluminium bicycle components between 1941 and 1944, at the height of the Second World War. It's not a time when you would have thought that aluminium, or indeed any resources, would have been especially easy to come by.

In 1952 Rodolphe and Roger Villemus, of Route de Chambery , Albertville, France, applied to register a design for handlebars for a moped. Perhaps they were Louis' sons and possibly this may indicate that the business was still active at this date.