Frank O’Meara (Painting by John S. Sargent)

“I don’t know why my mother decided to return to California; she never told me, but suddenly we were leaving. This beautiful adventure was over and I thought my heart would break. O’Meara had already given me a portrait of himself done by a fellow student — a young man named John Sargent. It was a fine likeness and I thought it was very well painted.”

— “This Life I’ve Loved,” Mrs. Isobel Field

That was a temporary low point for Isobel — “Belle” — Osbourne, 20, in the life she otherwise loved in the summer of 1878. For two years Belle and O’Meara — Frank O’Meara, a young Irish painter — appeared to be a couple in love, whether in the French countryside village of Grez-sur-Loing in summer or in the “City of Light,” Paris, in winter. Maybe that was at least part of the reason Fanny, her mother, 37, decided to suddenly leave France to return to East Oakland, California, and the little garden next to their pre-fabricated cottage that came to California in the hold of a clipper ship that went around Cape Horn.

Mrs. Osbourne — Fanny — was in a sort of hypocritical fix. She knew that the artist in O’Meara was his dominant trait and that when push came to shove, marriage would always lose, and Fanny was right. Frank lived for his art and never married. To save her daughter from the prospect of a tragic pregnancy is still considered by scores of biographers to have been the logical motive for Fanny’s sudden solution to quit France. But money played into it, too. Fanny’s estranged husband, Sam Osbourne, had temporarily fallen on hard times in California and had to stop sending Fanny the money that would keep her in France.

As a role model for her daughter throughout this episode, Mrs. Osbourne was compromised by her high-profile intimacy with a younger man, a Scottish bachelor, an aspiring writer named Robert Louis Stevenson, 27. A time would come when this situation would give Belle leverage in the competitive mother-daughter relationship between these two attractive women, who always seemed to be sisters to outsiders.

Robert Louis Stevenson was thoroughly smitten with Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, and seeing her departure with kids in tow put RLS into a genuine state of distress, The way he handled it would become literature (“Travels With A Donkey,” “The Amateur Emigrant,” “Across the Plains,” “The Silverado Squatters”). Belle’s younger brother Lloyd, now 10, had himself become attached to her mother’s new friend, who he called “Luly.” “R.L.S. always paid children the compliment of being serious, no matter what mocking light might dance in his brilliant brown eyes,” wrote Lloyd many years later in his “Intimate Portrait of R.L.S.,” “and I instantly elected him to a high place in my esteem.” Luly accompanied the Osbournes from France to London and then to Chelsea, last stop en route to the ship awaiting them in Liverpool. Lloyd remembered it well:

“But when the time came I had my own tragedy of parting, and the picture lives with me as clearly as though it were yesterday. We were standing in front of our compartment and the moment to say goodbye had come. It was terribly short and sudden and final, and before I could realize it, R.L.S. was walking down the long length of the platform, a diminishing figure. … Words cannot express the sense of bereavement, of desolation that suddenly struck at my heart. I knew I would never see him again.”

The title of Chapter 14 of Belle’s book is “Monterey”: “We came back from France to our cottage in East Oakland. Stopping at the farm in Indiana [home of Fanny’s family, the Vandegrifts, and her birthplace], my mother invited her younger sister, Nellie, to come with us to California, which was very pleasant for me. We began a friendship then that grew closer and closer as the years passed.” Nellie, too, would have a role in the RLS story, beginning with the serendipitous meeting yet to be between “The Amateur Emigrant,” Louis, and Nellie’s fiance-to-be, Adolpho Sanchez, in a saloon. Nellie would also write her sister’s first biography, “The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson,” 1920.

Upon reaching their Oakland cottage, Fanny surmised that her philandering husband Sam, a court employee in San Francisco, was using their home as a cozy weekend getaway for his girlfriends across the bay. It was a good setup for him, and he didn’t want to give it up, but the awkwardness of the situation required a solution. That would be Monterey.

When Fanny became Mrs. Osbourne in 1857, Sam was Lt. Osbourne and secretary for the governor of Indiana. He was popular with everybody, including the ladies, and he made friends easily. In San Francisco with two of those friends — John Lloyd, his old mining partner from Nevada, and Timothy Reardon, a lawyer, along with some journalists from the Overland Monthly — they founded what would become one of the most exclusive clubs in the West: the Bohemian Club, which attracted European painters importing the very essence of genuine bohemian culture from the Latin Quarter and the Parisian ateliers. One of its members, Virgil Williams, established the famous School of Design adjacent to the club.

What does this have to do with Monterey? Charles Warren Stoddard, poet and travel writer, was a member of the Bohemian Club, too. One day he traveled south along the coast from the City by the Bay to check out the ruins of an old Spanish Mission at Carmel that had come to his attention, and what he stumbled across on the way there astounded him. Belle includes it in her book: “It was Charles Warren Stoddard, the poet, who really had turned Monterey into an artist’s colony. Coming down to see the old Mission, he was so enchanted with the place that he sent word to his friends, Joe Strong, Julian Rix, and Jules Tavernier. They came to look and remained to paint. There were endless subjects: fishing boats, whales, the magnificent breakers dashing against a rocky shore, the amazing Monterey cypress trees and most popular of all, the Carmel Mission, then a beautiful ruin.” That was the time and they were the people who began the culture conquest that would make Monterey what it is today.

Hearing about Stoddard’s discovery, Sam went to work on his plan. Writes Belle, “Nellie and I were very much surprised when we were told, quite suddenly that they (Belle’s parents, Sam and Fanny) were going away together on a little trip. … A week later we were thrilled on getting a telegram asking to bring Lloyd and join them in Monterey. … The train stopped some distance from Monterey … there was no depot, no platform, only a dusty road. … My father was there to meet us … one of the riders hopped off his horse and came over to greet us. … To my surprise, it was Joe Strong, now one of California’s most successful artists.” Joe Strong would prove to be useful in helping Belle to put Frank O’Meara far in her rear view.

To be continued.