Violette Szabo

This time let's flash-forward to World War II. Violette Szabo was a British spy who aided the French resistance against Nazi domination. She had courage, spirit, an infectious laugh, and a cute Cockney accent. She also spoke fluent French, was good-looking, and an expert marksman. Although her superiors thought she wasn't smart enough, and too driven by revenge to be an effective spy, she proved them wrong and received the George Cross after the war. Unfortunately, she was not alive to collect it personally. She paid the ultimate price to stop Nazi aggression.

She was born in Paris in 1921, but grew up mostly in London. She did return to France briefly to live with in-laws because her parents were having trouble making ends meet during the Great Depression. However, by the time she was 11 she was back in London. The only girl among four brothers and multiple male cousins, Violette was considered a "tomboy," and she excelled at sports--particularly biking, skating and gymnastics. Her father, although he was a strict disciplinarian, was devoted to her. He enjoyed sport-shooting, and taught Violette to be an excellent marksman. This would come in handy later. However, she was headstrong, and rebelled against her father's authority. She even ran away to France once when she was a teenager. By the time she was 14 she'd left school and was working at Woolworth's selling perfume.

When World War II began, she joined the Women's Land Army, which was a group that did agricultural work to replace men who had been called into military service. After spending some time picking fruit in the country, she was bored enough to return to London and get a job in an armaments factory.

France had fallen to the Nazis quickly, and many French refugees crowded London. The city fathers honored them with a Bastille Day celebration and parade. Violette's mother (who, along with Violette, spoke fluent French), sent her to the parade to find a homesick French soldier and invite him to dinner where he could speak in his native tongue. Violette took one look at the dashing French officer Etienne Szabo and decided it had to be him. She was 19 and he was over 30, but the two were married only 42 days later. Almost immediately, he left for Africa to fight with Free French units alongside the British.

Violette got a job as a telephone operator, and worked through the Blitz in London. But she wanted to do more. With her good looks and charm, she managed to talk her way into an anti-aircraft gun unit in a job called "director," which meant she used trigonometry to help gunners hit moving targets (specifically, German bombers). But almost as soon as she started, she found out she was pregnant, and returned to London to give birth to a daughter, Talia. When the baby was born, Violette sent her to the country, out of harm's way, and worked at an aircraft factory alongside her father.

Meanwhile, her husband was in North Africa, fighting with Free French and English troops against the feared Afrika Korps of Erwin Rommel. He barely escaped with his life after a battle with the 15th Panzer Division, and a few months later personally led an attack at the Second Battle of El Alamein. He was shot in the chest and killed in action.

When she heard this, Violette was filled with rage and vowed revenge. After a seemingly innocuous conversation with a recruiter who realized she spoke fluent French, she was invited to train as a secret agent with the Special Operations Executive (SOE), with an eye toward assigning her to the so-called "F Section" in France. She could speak French and was attractive. The SOE had learned that Nazi troops tended to give good-looking women more leniency than men, when it came to searches and curfews. F Section was in desperate need of female couriers and intelligence-gatherers. Violette was sent to Scotland to train in paramilitary and commando warfare. She was also trained in "silent killing," escape and evasion tactics, demolitions (for sabotage work) and cryptography.

But her superior officers were reluctant to use her in the field, primarily because of her "fatalistic" attitude. One wrote that she "seems perfectly willing to die" as long as she could get revenge for her husband's death. They also thought she was too impulsive. Furthermore, her training course grades were somewhat mediocre (she received the equivalent of a "D"), and it was determined that she had "only average intelligence." But the need outweighed the risks, and partially because she was the best female marksman they had, they decided to activate her. She was trained in parachuting, but on her first jump, she landed badly and wound up with a terribly sprained ankle. As it turned out, this injury would later have tragic consequences.

After healing, she passed the course and was sent to join a spy unit operating in France under the code name SALESMAN. She was popular among both the men and women she worked with. Her Cockney accent and infectious laughter endeared her to her cohorts. She had high spirits and enjoyed playing practical jokes. One contemporary called her "a dark-haired slip of mischief." When it came time for her to go on her first mission, her commanders gave her one last chance to refuse, saying she had only a 1 in 4 chance of survival. She went anyway.

In 1944, Violette and spy-organizer Phillippe Liewer parachuted out of a B-24 Liberator bomber into Nazi-occupied France. Her cover was that she was a secretary who was a resident of Le Havre - this ruse got around Nazi rules and allowed her to go to her "home" in the so-called "Restricted Zone" along the French coast. Her code name was Louise. She traveled the countryside and collected intelligence about arrested spies. This intelligence convinced Liewer that the SALESMAN unit was compromised beyond repair. In fact, she learned that the Nazis already knew Liewer's identity and code name. She also figured out which factories were making war material for the Nazis, which helped the Allies determine targets to bomb.

After this, it was deemed prudent for her to return to England, but on the way, the plane she was in was hit by anti-aircraft guns. She'd not yet gotten a look at her blonde-haired, blue-eyed pilot, so when he made an emergency landing and opened the door, she thought  he was a Nazi. Screaming curses at him, she tried to physically attack him, but soon realized her mistake. Instead of hitting the pilot, she kissed him.

Her service wasn't over, however. Just after D-Day (on June 8 1944) she parachuted into France again, this time near the village of Sussac. She was part of a four-person team of British and Americans. This time, her cover was that she was the widow of an antiques dealer. What she was really doing was sabotaging Nazi communication lines.

Then a new mission came: she and a French associate, Dufour, were to travel to organize resistance fighters in Correze and Dordogne. Violette was an avid cyclist and wanted to take a bike, especially because the Nazis had banned the French from driving cars. But partially because of the need for speed, and partially because of her bad ankle, Liewer insisted on her taking a small Citroen. Violette, at her own request, was armed with a submachine gun and eight clips of ammunition. On the way, they picked up another resistance fighter called Bariaud. He told them something they didn't know: that the 2nd SS Panzer Division was in the area, searching for a commander that had been captured. They soon came upon a roadblock, and Dufour, the commander of the mission, wasn't taking any chances. He slowed the car so that Bariaud could jump out and warn resistance fighters elsewhere of the Panzer division's presence.

Dufour stopped the car some way before the roadblock, but within sight of the Nazis. He and Violette ran from the car in opposite directions - he into a cornfield, she into a stand of trees. A gun battle ensued in which one innocent farmer's wife was killed. Szabo crossed the road under fire to join Dufour in the cornfield. Still under fire, they ran through the field, across a stream, and up a hill toward a large apple tree. But her old ankle injury came back to haunt her: she fell, badly twisting the ankle, and could barely walk, let alone run. Dufour chivalrously attempted to carry her, but she demanded that he save himself while she provided covering fire. She literally dragged herself to the apple tree, and started shooting at the Nazis while Dufour escaped to hide in the barn of a resistance-friendly fighter.

For a full half-hour, Violette single-handedly held off the Nazi pursuit. She killed at least one Nazi officer, and it's possible she killed a few more. She wounded nearly a dozen. But eventually, she ran out of ammunition. Two Nazis dragged her to an armored car, where she spit in the face of a Nazi officer. Defiantly, she demanded that they untie her so she could smoke a cigarette.

Violette was interrogated for four days at a local SS Security Service building, but they couldn't get anything out of her. Meanwhile, Dufour was desperately making plans to try to free her, and he may have succeeded, had she not been transferred first. The Gestapo stepped in, and informed the SS that since she was fighting behind enemy lines in civilian clothes, the Geneva Convention did not apply to her. She was transferred to the French Gestapo headquarters. There, she was interrogated under torture. She didn't give up anything, and gave them a false name, but German intelligence eventually deduced her identity as the agent code-named Louise.

She and other prisoners were transferred to Germany by train. On the way, an allied air strike caused the Nazis to abandon the train for a time; chained to another female prisoner, Violette brought water to the male prisoners, who were kept in cages, which encouraged them so much they sang patriotic songs once the train got going again, to the irritation of the Nazi officers, who issued a few beatings to shut them up.

Eventually, kept on starvation rations in squalid conditions, she was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, a place specifically for women prisoners. It was notorious for the brutality of its guards. Violette and other women were place in a hard labor gang, forced to work outside cutting trees in the dead of winter - while obliged to wear only summer clothes. They were given barely-digestible bread crusts and forced to sleep in unheated huts with no blankets. Many froze or starved to death.

Not Violette. She kept making plans to escape. Survivors who knew her said she was upbeat and confident of either liberation by the Allies or that her escape plans would work out. She even managed to construct a makeshift transmitter on the sly and tried to send coded messages back to England, but it's unknown whether she succeeded. When this was discovered, the Nazi guards brutally beat her and sexually assaulted her, then threw her into solitary confinement. Weeks later, she and two other similarly treated female prisoners were led to the grounds of the crematorium. The other two were too badly beaten to walk, but Violette managed to hold her head high. Her morale had suffered, but she remained defiant, refusing a blindfold and demanding a cigarette, which the amused guards gave her. After that, they shot her in the head three times and cremated her body. Violette was only 23 years old.

No one knew what happened to her until 1946. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, as well as numerous French medals. Her five-year old daughter Talia solemnly accepted the George Cross from King George IV personally. Today, there are no less than seven monuments to her in England and France. She was the subject of multiple books at one 1958 film starring Virginia McKenna.

And she wasn't the only one. Women played a huge part in SOE operations during World War II, and very few of them survived to tell the tale. Said one, Odette Hallowes, of Violette: "She was the bravest of us all."

I think it's time for another movie, personally, to introduce this hero to a new generation - because without a doubt, Violette Szabo was truly a Badass Chick of History. 

"Black Agnes," Countess of Dunbar

Let's travel to Scotland in the early 1300s. A nobleman called Patrick, the Earl of Dunbar and March, married well. His lovely bride had pale skin, flashing black eyes and blue-black raven hair. She was the daughter of the fierce fighter Randolph, Duke of Moray - a powerful crony of William Wallace and later Robert the Bruce - and as it turned out, she inherited his belligerent nature and sarcastic attitude. It would serve her husband and her people well.

After the wars of Scottish independence, Robert the Bruce's son, David II, ended up King of Scotland. But David was just a child, and the English weren't at all happy with an impudent and free Scotland just north of the border. The English King Edward III, who was in the midst of fixing the problems he inherited from his incompetent father, backed an upstart called Edward Balliol, who had a decent claim to the Scottish throne. Edward III stormed into Scotland and installed Balliol on the throne.

Meanwhile, Edward III had more important things on his mind than Scotland - mainly that he believed he should be the King of France as well as England. Devoting himself to that, he left the continued pacification of Scotland in the hands of his lieutenants. One of those was Montague, the Earl of Salisbury. There was one castle Montague had to take before Scotland could be tamed - the Castle Dunbar, which lie at a vital strategic point. It had been recently fortified by Patrick, Earl of Dunbar and March. But Patrick was away, fighting elsewhere. He left his beautiful wife Agnes in charge.

She had earned the nickname "Black Agnes" because of the great contrast of her dark eyes and hair with her pale complexion. Turns out, the name was also a fit moniker for her warlike spirit. She was determined that Montague wasn't going to take Castle Dunbar on her watch.

Montague rolled up his troops before the castle, believing it wouldn't take much more than intimidation to settle things. He was wrong. It soon became apparent that Black Agnes was a skillful commander. All in all, Montague was obliged to spend almost half a year trying to take the castle. Worse, Agnes appeared on the walls daily to taunt her opponents with what one historian has called "biting sarcasms."

In a famous scene of history, the English rolled up catapults, battering rams and other siege engines. Hurling boulders at the walls, they called for Agnes to surrender. Instead, she and her chief ladies marched out onto the ramparts, wielding not swords, but hankies. They sarcastically proceeded to wipe down the battlements, insinuating that Montague had accomplished nothing but to kick up some dust.

By this time, Montague had figured out that Agnes was no ordinary woman. He'd come to respect her, and maybe he even had a little crush on her. When he was personally overseeing the installation of some siege engines, an arrow whizzed out from the castle and thunk! It pierced the chain mail armor of a knight who stood next to Montague. The knight fell and died right at Montague's feet. Montague sighed and said, "Agnes's love-arrows shoot straight for the heart!"

His next strategy was something called "the sow." It was essentially a massive battering-ram covered with boiled and hardened leather to protect the men operating it. With great trouble, the English rolled it up to the walls. Seeing it, Agnes couldn't keep her sarcasm at bay. She hollered, "Montague, be careful! Soon that sow will give birth to pigs!" At that, she directed a dozen men to hurl a massive chunk of masonry onto the sow, crushing both it and its occupants.

Montague tried bribery next, convincing a gatekeeper to open it for him in the dead of night. But the gatekeeper informed Agnes. She told him to go ahead and open the gate. Montague led his raiding party through the darkness. One of his soldiers, John Copeland, passed in front of Montague to enter the gate, and at that moment, Agnes dropped the portcullis. She meant to snag Montague himself, but made the best of the situation. As he was dragged away from the walls by his men, Agnes called to him, "Farewell! I'd hoped you would dine with me tonight and help me defend my castle from the English!"

Montague thought he'd scored an ace in the hole when the English captured Agnes's brother, John, the Earl of Moray. The prisoner was paraded out before the castle, in chains and wearing a noose around his neck. Montague threatened to execute John if Anges didn't surrender. She called, "Then execute him, and I shall inherit the Earldom of Moray." To Montague's credit, he didn't kill the hapless fellow, who survived the war and lived on. 

Frustrated, Montague couldn't think of anything else to do but blockade the castle and starve them out (one wonders why he didn't try that in the first place). He lined up ships on the sea-side and troops on the landward side. But the fierce Scottish patriot Sir Alexander Ramsay had heard of Agnes's bravery. With only 40 hand-picked men, he eluded the English patrols and snuck into the castle through a postern gate by the sea-side. The next morning, Agnes, Ramsay, and the able-bodied men of the castle stormed out of the gates and utterly routed the advance guard of the besieging English.

At that point, Montague decided he'd had enough. Saluting Agnes, who stood proudly on the battlements, he withdrew his army and went away. Agnes was reunited with Patrick and she lived another 30 years, dying peacefully of natural causes. So with a combination of martial prowess, an acid tongue, and the help of a few friends, Black Agnes proved she was a Badass Chick of History.

Semiramis, Queen of Assyria

Let's go way back to the Assyrian Empire for our next Badass Chick of History: Semiramis, Queen of Assyria. While she was certainly a historic figure, our information comes from men who wrote about her hundreds of years later. Much of her story is wrapped up in myth and legend. But it's unlikely that such tales would have sprung up about a woman who wasn't out-of-the-ordinary, and we can assume from the stories that survive, whatever their truth, that her contemporaries thought of her as a badass.

Tales about her childhood are obviously mythical. She was the natural daughter of a goddess of the Philistines. But her mother, behaving oddly as most ancient deities did, abandoned the baby girl in the woods in Syria. Luckily, a flock of doves came and fed little Semiramis. She was discovered by a shepherd who raised her as his own. This sounds like about a dozen other ancient myths.

When she was about 14, Semiramis met the warlord Menon, who was one of the chief lieutenants of Ninus, lord of the Assyrian Empire. Menon was inspecting the king's flocks when he noticed the shepherd girl. He was charmed by her beauty and intelligence, captivated by the fact that he could actually hold a conversation with her. He essentially kidnapped her by tricking her into coming back to the palace with him. He kept her prisoner until she married him. When she did, she turned the tables on him, charming everyone at court and amassing huge influence, much greater than her husband's. She had two boys with Menon. But traditional family life wasn't for her - she ached to distinguish herself. All she needed was an opportunity. Her charm and popularity gave her the freedom to create one.

Soon, King Ninas invaded the land of Media. Semiramis insisted on going to war alongside her husband. The campaign was a blitzkrieg, as city after city fell to the conquering Assyrians. However, when the army reached Bactria, they found the walls nigh-impregnable. A bitter siege followed, but the Bactrian defense was so effective that Ninas decided to retreat. Semiramis would have none of it. She showed up to a council of war and offered to personally lead an assault on the walls. For whatever reason, the warlords let her. She rose to the occasion, storming the fortifications amidst showers of arrows and stones. The soldiers, shamed by her example, were spurred to greater efforts, but Semiramis was the first to climb atop the battlements. After a brief but vicious struggle on the city walls, Semiramis raised the standard of Assyria, winning the battle the king wanted to avoid.

King Ninas hadn't taken much notice of Semiramis before. He did now! He was smitten. He asked Menon to divorce her. Menon refused. Ninas offered his own royal sister in trade, but Menon still refused. Legend has it he even went a little bit crazy. Irritated, the king had Menon's eyes gouged out and threw him into prison, where he committed suicide. Ninas then married Semiramis, who bore him a son, Ninyas.

Ninas knew Semiramis had charisma, but he didn't count on her popularity with the court. She gave generous gifts and made sure to be friendly with the king's most powerful advisers and lieutenants. Eventually, she begged the king to let her show her stuff by putting the empire under her absolute rule for five days. Finally, Ninas relented and let her take control. Big mistake. Avenging poor Menon, she used her power to throw Ninas into prison and had him executed. She beautified the city of Babylon, and, legend has it, surrounded it with its famous wall. She is also credited with quite a few civic monuments and inscriptions that are almost certainly not her work, but again, this is more proof of how large her legend loomed.

This wasn't enough for her adventurous spirit, however. She had dreams of conquest, and unlike most women of the time, she had the power to make them come true. Under her leadership, the Assyrians stormed into Ethiopia and took most of it, making the Assyrian Empire even larger. While she was in Ethiopia she consulted a popular oracle there. She asked the prophet how long she had to live. The oracle told her she would not die until her son conspired against her. Following her conquest of Ethiopia she turned her army west toward Lybia and conquered it, too.

Like Alexander the Great after her, Semiramis could not rest until she'd conquered exotic India. She raised an army of more than three million, says one ancient historian. This is surely an exaggeration, but we can assume it was a huge force. Semiramis knew the power of the Indian army was its war elephants. Lacking any of her own, she ordered her artisans to create huge wicker-and-skin coverings for the biggest camels she could find. From a distance, it appeared to the Indians that she, too, had acquired war elephants. Stabrobates, the Indian king, sent envoys to ask Semiramis exactly what she was up to. She replied that her business was none of his, but that he'd learn her intentions in good time. She quickly marched to the Indus river and made a bridge of boats in an attempt to cross. The Indians fought hard, however, and even though they eventually retreated, a great many Assyrians lost their lives in the battle.

Undaunted, and against the advice of her military advisers, Semiramis pushed across the river and into the heart of India. But it turns out Stabrobates had only ordered a strategic retreat earlier. He'd had time to turn and face the Assyrians once again. This time, the real elephants charged into the fake ones and went hog wild, stomping and crushing everything in their path. The Assyrian army was scattered. But Semiramis, utterly unfazed by this, rallied her men. Mounting her warhorse, she stormed the Assyrian ranks with, as the ancient historian Diodorus tells us, "as little regard for her own safety as though she had been the meanest soldier in the army." Stabrobates, seeing her in the midst of the fiercest part of the battle, rode forward to take her on himself, and even though he wounded her twice, she fought him off. But by that time, the Assyrians were completely routed. Semiramis was pragmatic enough to realize there wasn't much more she could do. Spurring her horse, she fled Stabrobates, and, perhaps because she weighed much less, easily outdistanced him.

The Assyrian army made it back to the Indus, but the soldiers were panicked, and without martial discipline, crowded onto the makeshift boat-bridge. Thousands of Assyrians were trampled to death in the confusion. When Semiramis made it across, she ordered the bridge destroyed. The Indian king had the good sense to let it go at that - as long as she wouldn't cross the Indus, he had no desire to pursue her.

By the time Semiramis returned to Babylon, she learned that her son had been conspiring to take her place. This fit perfectly with the oracle she'd heard in Ethiopia. She loved her son. To avoid conflict with him, she voluntarily abdicated the throne in his favor. He became king and she retired with honor, living to be 62 years old.

In all of ancient history, only two rulers had the wherewithal, courage, and skill to carry a battle eastward past the Indus river: Alexander the Great and Semiramis. I think that's enough to make her a Badass Chick of History.

Marie-Christine de Lelaing, Princess d'Espinoy

Marie-Christine de Lelaing was descended from badasses on both sides of her family, and was married to one, too. When her town came under attack in 1581, she personally led the defense and stood up to the infamous Duke of Parma. Wounded in battle, she lived to tell the tale...for a little while.

We all know the date July 4, 1776, when the United States declared independence from Great Britain. Lesser known is the date July 26, 1581, when the United Netherlands declared independence from Spain. The Spanish Empire had taken vast swaths of the Netherlands as part of the devastating wars that followed the Protestant Reformation. The Netherlands, spitting in the eye of Spain, invited the French Duke of Anjou to rule over them as an independent constitutional monarchy.

Of course, Spain would have none of this. The Duke of Anjou boldly entered the Netherlands at the head of a massive army - some 12,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry troopers. But the Spanish governor of the Netherlands, Alexander Farnese, the Duke of Parma, was a military genius. Even worse, the Dutch themselves were not unilaterally Protestant, and many welcomed the Spanish rulers. With the Dutch people divided, and Farnese's skill as a soldier and administrator, the Duke of Anjou's army was frustrated at every turn. Eventually, decided maybe ruling the Netherlands wasn't such a hot idea after all and went home.

That left a lot of locally recruited Protestant-friendly soldiers out of work. Most of them flocked to the nearest friendly city, Tournai, in modern Belgium. Its French-elected governor, Pierre de Melun, the Prince d'Espinoy, had created there a haven for a strong Protestant community. He was away, however, serving in the Prince of Orange's army. Farnese saw the leaderless town as easy prey, perhaps, and marched against it.

Governor Pierre's wife, known to the people as Princess Christine, surprised everyone by immediately taking command of the town and preparing to resist the Spanish. It should have been no surprise. Her father was Count Charles II, a Knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and seasoned military veteran. Her mother was related to the French admiral Duke Montmorency, a war hero who opposed the sinister Cardinal Richelieu and came to a glorious end in battle. Defiance in the face of danger was in Christine's blood.

Donning armor, she appeared on the city walls and bolstered the courage of the citizens. Her words, as history has transmitted them: "It's me, the wife of your governor who is marching into war, risking his life for you and his country. Follow my lead! I would rather die than abandon my nation!" Or something like that.

According to some accounts, the soldiers wept with joy to see her. When Farnese maneuvered his troops into place against Tournai, he called upon the lieutenant of the garrison to surrender. But Christine herself appeared on the walls to answer him with what one witness called "a defiant refusal." The odds were against the town, but Christine's bravery inspired the soldiers to put up a valiant defense in the first assault, pushing the Spanish back from the town walls. Farnese, seething, settled in for a siege, writing that he would reduce the place in two weeks.

Two months and several major assaults later, the Spanish had not yet taken Tournai. Every day, the Princess Christine donned her armor and appeared on the town walls in sight of both the Dutch and Spanish. She was more than an inspiring figurehead - she issued orders to her husband's lieutenants and supervised all the defenses in person. When the Spanish attacked, she fought alongside the defenders. In a particularly hard-fought battle she took a terrible wound in the arm. Hearing this, Farnese again called for Tournai's surrender. Again, the Princess was defiant.

But this state of affairs couldn't last. Spanish sappers had been busy undermining the walls from outside the town. Meanwhile, inside the city, a Dominican friar called Father Gery - part of an order that essentially amounted to a black ops organization for the Vatican - was undermining the morale and spiritual confidence of the soldiers from within. There were also many Catholics in the town, and Father Gery had taken advantage of the turmoil to unite them.

With crumbling walls and hostile neighbors, the Protestants of Tournai begged the Princess to surrender the town. They told her they were afraid an insurrection would break out among the Catholic inhabitants any moment. Christine was hesitant. If the Spanish were true to their reputation, Farnese's men would brutally and thoroughly sack the town.

Like a good ruler, however, she was pragmatic enough to know when to quit. Had she not been, in her reported words, "abandoned by Protestants and Catholics alike," she would have fought on. Instead, she turned a strategic defeat into a victory of propaganda. Negotiating herself with Farnese under a flag of truce, she obtained surprisingly honorable terms of surrender. In lieu of storming through the town with fire and sword for rape, murder and looting, Farnese accepted a payment of 100,000 crowns from the city treasury. Princess Christine, with her cavalry escort and entourage, were allowed to pass through the gates of the town "with all the honors of war," carrying every last bit of her and her husband's personal property with her.

As the Princess passed through the ranks of her Spanish enemies, they spontaneously erupted in applause. Brutal and oppressive on the whole, there was a spirit of gallantry and daring among the Spanish commanders. Throughout the siege, Christine had acquired their respect. She marched to join her husband in Oudenaarde, and enjoyed a high reputation in Europe as the story spread. The couple retired to Antwerp where she died soon afterward (the manner of her death is not recorded).

In 1863, the city of Tournai erected a statue to honor her. It still stands today in the heart of Grand-Place in Tournai as a testament to the courage of a woman brave enough to thumb her nose at the Spanish Empire and live - at least a little while - to tell the tale.