“He was slim and dark and so odd and foreign-looking, a sort of gentleman gypsy, and we were surprised when he greeted us somewhat formally, in English.”

Miss Isobel “Belle” Osbourne, from Oakland, California, was 18 when she first encountered Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson, “R.A.M.,” 28, inside Chevillons inn on the River Loing in the rustic French village of Grez in June 1876. Belle and her mother Fanny had been warned that the population of male-only summertime artists wanted to keep it that way and also, they were on their way. The Fontainebleau region was their open air clubhouse with no girls allowed. Women were supposed to go to Normandy to paint. To cut to the chase, R.A.M. “Bob” Stevenson had altogether failed in his attempt to expel by means of intimidation the two female intruders who had invaded their sacred precinct and, to pour salt on the wound, had taken rooms at their favorite inn. Bob’s aborted mission would be the beginning of something new that would involve Bob’s cousin Robert Louis Stevenson in one of the most enduring true love stories to survive the 19th century, and it was the same one Belle’s mother was in.

Grez-sur-Loing, the village, is remembered in art history for the international school of painters it attracted from the 1870s into the early 20th century. They came from the USA, Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and Japan. Bob Stevenson was one of them. Belle and her mother took to Bob easily. “Bob Stevenson is the most beautiful creature I ever met in my life,” Fanny told a friend in San Francisco. “He is exactly like one of Ouida’s heroes, with the hand of steel in the glove of velvet.” Bob and his fellow aspiring artists comprised the Anglo-Saxon element of summer guests at Chevillons inn, and Belle got to meet them one by one as they arrived. Pasdesus, another young American painter, came next. He it was who gave away the secret of Grez to these women when he knew them in Paris.

“A few days later Sir Walter Simpson arrived,” wrote Belle in her book “This Life I’ve Loved,” “not to paint but to meet his friend Louis Stevenson who would be at Grez in a few days.” Simpson was “Bart” Simpson, Stevenson’s canoeing companion in his first book “An Inland Voyage.” Louis and Bart went way back with memories of playing together in Queen Street Gardens in Edinburgh as preschoolers. Bart’s father, Sir James Young Simpson, became rich and medically famous because of his historic experiments with chloroform for pain relief. Simpson’s self-experimenting with his drug would be a trait that R.L.S. would borrow when he was fleshing out a certain fictional Dr. Jekyll. When Sir James died, Bart inherited the “Sir” and the money that came with it. Bart didn’t paint, but his brother Willy did, and he was there, too. Bart liked to use his money to party with his friends, had studied some law, like Louis, and like Louis, never took to it.

Then there was “Bloomer,” another American. Hiram Bloomer was from California. Belle described him as “a gentle kindly man who painted innumerable pictures of the bridge, all more or less alike.” Bloomer, it turned out, knew Virgil Williams, the founder of the School of Design in San Francisco where Belle and her mother had studied before going to France. Today paintings by Bloomer and Virgil can be seen together in the Oakland Museum. Then along came Theodore Robinson, John S. Sargent and Henry Enfield. In her book, Belle says, “It was like a scene from an old melodrama, the way R.L.S. was praised by his admirers and heralded with enthusiasm before he appeared on the scene. Frank O’Meara, an Irish boy of 20, was the next arrival at Chevillons. He too praised Louis to the skies.” Frank and Belle would become good friends, so good that Fanny cornered him one day to find out his definition of commitment.

Will Hickock Low, the painter from Albany, New York, was already there, living a short distance upriver with his first wife, whom he never names. Low recorded in his own book “A Chronicle of Friendships,” 1908, his first encounter with Mrs. Fanny Osbourne and her two surviving children. He saw Lloyd first, an American-looking kid of 8 playing with French boys, running around and singing “John Brown’s body is a-mouldering in the grave.” Soon one evening at dinner in the garden of Chevillons, Low found out who that kid was. “We took our places near Bob, quite at the end of the table. Looking toward the opposite end, I was surprised to see two new faces — the faces of women. … Bob informed me that they were my compatriots, Californians, art students. … They were mother and daughter, I was told, though in appearance more like sisters. … It seems curious to me today to think how little during the remainder of the summer was my acquaintance with these ladies, for, as wife and stepdaughter, they were to become so closely identified with the life of Louis Stevenson.”

Finally, Belle got to find out what all the R.L.S. fuss was about. “One night we were at dinner; though the lamps were lit, it was not yet dark. We had finished our meal, and were talking idly and pleasantly over our coffee. Happening to glance at my mother, I saw that she was looking toward the window with an odd intense gaze. It was not exactly a window, but a half-door, and standing in the opening … stood a young man, slender, dark, with a high color and yellow hair worn rather long. He was leaning forward staring, with a sort of surprised admiration, at Fanny Osbourne. Years afterwards, he told me he had fallen in love with her then and there.

“Amid sudden cries of ‘There he is!’ ‘It’s Stevenson!’ ‘Louis!’ the stranger vaulted lightly into the room, his friends greeting him noisily. There were explanations, introductions, laughter. He’d had his dinner, he said, but would join us with coffee, and took his seat on my mother’s right which was his place at the table all the time we were at Grez.”

“That was the first time I noticed the extraordinary affect that Louis Stevenson made on any company he joined, bringing out the best in everyone, and arousing enthusiasm and admiration. That I am not exaggerating, that my memory is clear on this point, I can prove from E.F. Benson’s book ‘As We Were’. In it, the author states that Edmund Gosse, the poet ‘who had been intimate with R.L.S. in the gallant days of his youth,’ considered him ‘the most entrancing personality he had ever come across!’ He goes on to say, ‘The Gods had come down in the likeness of men,’ and Louis was to Gosse the most radiant of all his memories.”

To be continued.