[Footnote 11: On gaining the heights of St. Florent, one of the most mournful, and at the same time most magnificent spectacles, burst upon the eye. These heights form a vast semicircle; at the bottom of which a broad bare plain extends to the edge of the water. Near an hundred thousand unhappy souls now blackened over that dreary expanse,--old men, infants and women, mingled, with the half-armed soldiery, caravans, crowded baggage waggons and teams of oxen, all full of despair, impatience, anxiety and terror:--Behind, were the smoke of their burning villages, and the thunder of the hostile artillery;--before, the broad stream of the Loire, divided by a long low island, also covered with the fugitives,--twenty frail barks plying in the stream--and, on the far banks, the disorderly movements of those who had effected the passage, and were waiting there to be rejoined by their companions. Such, Mad. de L. assures us, was the tumult and terror of the scene, and so awful the recollections it inspired, that it can never be effaced from the memory of any of those who beheld it; and that many of its awe-struck spectators have concurred in stating, that it brought forcibly to their imaginations the unspeakable terrors of the great day of judgment.--_Edinb. Rev. No. LI. p. 24._]
It is said that when the Prince Talmont, with the royalists, crossed over from Saint Florent, under the fire of the republican troops who had taken possession of the heights, they consisted of thirty thousand individuals, but that there were not twenty thousand warriors; among them were five thousand women: arrived in the open country, without warlike stores, they soon wanted provisions. This multitude created a famine wherever it went, and suffered a famine itself. The first unsuccessful enterprize produced discouragement, and necessarily the desertion of the army: it diminished two-thirds when it was repulsed at Angers; and when the chiefs, despairing (after the battle of Mans) of not being able to recross the Loire at Ancenis, led back the wrecks of the army to Savenay, it consisted only of fifteen thousand men, half dead with hunger and misery: the major part of these were exterminated by the republicans; the rest dispersed themselves, and from that time all efforts ceased. Prince de Talmont was arrested near Erne, tried at Rennes, and executed at Laval: of the fate of Lescure and the other chiefs, a melancholy catalogue is furnished by Madame de la Roche-Jaquelin.