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All this time I had had not a mouthful of breakfast, and we betook ourselves to Doney's bottega to get a cup of coffee before going home. But when we attempted this we found that it was more easily said than done. The Via dei Malcontenti as well as the whole of the Piazza di Santa Croce was some five feet under water!
After some little time and trouble we found an apartment in the Palazzo Berti, in the ominously named Via dei Malcontenti. It was so called because it was at one time the road to the Florentine Tyburn. Our house was the one next to the east end of the church of Santa Croce. Our rooms looked on to a large garden, and were pleasant enough.
It was not long after our establishment in the Via dei Malcontenti that a great disaster came upon Florence and its inhabitants and guests. Arno was not in the habit of following the evil example of the Tiber by treating Florence as the latter so frequently did Rome. But in the winter of the year 1844 a terrible and unprecedented flood came.
But both the visits I am speaking of, as having occurred within a few days of each other, were big with fate, to me, in the same department of human affairs. The visit of Dickens was destined eventually to bring me my second wife, as the reader has seen. The visit of Mr. and Mrs. Garrow to the Via dei Malcontenti, much about the same time, brought me my first.
She was a very fierce old lady, and did not, I fear, contribute to the happiness of any member of her family. How well I remember the appearance of Mr. and Mrs. Garrow, and those two girls in my mother's drawing-room in the Via dei Malcontenti. The two girls, I remember, were dressed exactly alike and very dowdily.
There was nothing to pay at either place, and the children were taught well and taken good care of. The convent of the Doratei is in the Via dei Malcontenti, and that of the Frate Scalopi in the Piazza Santa Croce. Marc Antonio and Fausta and Flavia and Teresa used to set off at seven every morning, winter and summer, and La Mamma walked with them, carrying me in her arms.
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