Baron Felix Ghislain de Bethune

[From Dutch Wikipedia article] De Bethune was the fourth of nine children in the family of the architect and art historian Jean Bethune (1821-1894) and Emilie d'Outryve Ydewalle.

He is remembered in the 1935 memoirs of his wife's nephew, R G W Stark, who recalled Felix visiting them at their home in Oxford:

"Uncle Félix (Baron de Béthune) & Aunt Madge used to stay fairly often. My earliest impressions of Uncle Felix were a large kindly man who spoke little but with a distinctly foreign accent and smoked interminable cigars. He was a grandson of a former prime minister of Belgium, turned to Protestantism and became an ardent writer and reformer in its cause. He wrote ‘Le Luxe’ of which I have a copy somewhere. He was well-known as a lecturer in France too. An excessively patient, unselfish man, as he well had need to be. Completely spoilt his wife Magdalena, though perhaps I oughtn’t to mention it!

"In his younger days, after his “apostasy” he said his brothers (and father?) were very angry with him. They even tried to have him certified as a lunatic and were actually driving him to an asylum to have him locked up when he guessed their intention & managed to escape.

"During the war he was imprisoned by the Germans as one of the “notables” in Brussels, but managed to escape to England. German officers were quartered on their house and they lost a good deal. Most of the damage they suffered however was later found to be due to the Bruxellors themselves. I fear that Uncle Felix lost faith a good deal not only in his fellow countrymen whom he admitted sorrowfully to be somewhat low scum, but also in religion. Though I remember he used to say to Mother that the difference between people like themselves and ordinary Christians was: “They believe, but we know!”

"He was killed by an accident whilst riding his bicycle in Brussels shortly after the war. They adopted a boy “Bertie” (H.F. de Béthune) in about 1901/2 “of good Scotch family”, but we were never told more. It had to be kept a strict secret by all of us children and it was so. We have never mentioned the matter to him to this day. The poor chap went in ignorance of his true parentage till after he married (Marjorie Mainwaring) in about 1927 (?), and it created something of an uproar in her family when it was discovered that he was not the Baron de Béthune after all."