He used to work in the royal library with Antoine Varillas, a French historiographer who influenced the way Saint-Réal that wrote history.
Saint-Réal’s book was also the basis of the English writer Thomas Otway’s play Don Carlos, Prince of Spain.
The historical work is not serious by modern criteria, but it was regarded by people of the end of the 17th and of the 18th centuries as a good example of classical prosis[check spelling].
In Le Siècle de Louis XIV, Voltaire calls Saint-Réal the "French Sallust" because of this work.
There were many editions of hisŒuvres complètes from the 17th to the 19th centuries, some of which were longer than others by including some works falsely attributed to him.