Lewis, also known as Le Lewis, was the brand of Louis Villemus. 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.

Societé Le Lewis was based in Voiron, near Grenoble, where Louis Villemus appears to have been associated with a specialist cycle shop run by a M. Bernadet. However, Louis Villemus appears to have lived in Albertville, also in the French Alps and not so far from Saint-Michel-de-Maurienne and additionally seems to be associated with the Reyhand bicycle brand, based in Lyon. Voiron, Albertville and Lyon 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.