As a young man he won a fencing contest leading to his appointment as a "gendarme de la garde du roi" by king Louis XVI.

His social and professional ties to prominent figures such as Marie Antoinette and the Duke of Orléans made him a target of the Reign of Terror, culminating in a period of imprisonment spanning at least eleven months.

There he met the fencing masters Domenico Angelo and his son Henry, the mysterious Chevalier d'Éon and the teenage Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, all of whom would play a role in his future.

In 1769, the Parisian public was amazed to see Saint-Georges, well known for his fencing prowess, playing as a violinist in Gossec's new orchestra, Le Concert des Amateurs in the Hôtel de Soubise.

[44] After less than two years under Saint-George's' direction, the group was described by Jean-Benjamin de La Borde as "performing with great precision and delicate nuances", who also said it had become "the best orchestra for symphonies in Paris, and perhaps in all of Europe".

[36][f] Playwright, arms dealer, and Secret du Roi (spy) Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais began to collect funds from private contributors, including many of the Concert's patrons, to send aid for the American cause.

[57] Queen Marie Antoinette attended some of Saint-Georges's concerts at the Hôtel de Soubise, arriving sometimes without notice, so the orchestra wore court attire for all its performances.

But, according to Baron von Grimm's Correspondence litteraire, philosophique et critique, three of the Opéra's leading ladies (Marie-Madeleine Guimard, Rosalie Levasseur and Sophie Arnould) petitioned the Queen in January in opposition to his appointment, saying "that their honor and delicate conscience could never allow them to submit to the orders of a mulatto".

Marie-Antoinette preferred to hold her musicales in the salon of her private apartment in the palace or in the recently established Théâtre de la Reine in the gardens of Versailles.

Ernestine, Saint-Georges's first opera, with a libretto by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, the notorious author of Les Liaisons dangereuses, was performed on 19 July 1777, at the Comédie-Italienne.

Madame de Montesson, the morganatic wife of the Duc d'Orléans, realized her ambition to engage Saint-Georges as music director of her fashionable private theater.

The Duc d'Orléans appointed Saint-Georges as Lieutenant de la chasse of his vast hunting grounds at Raincy, with an additional salary of 2000 Livres a year.

Seeing his protégé at loose ends and recalling that the Prince of Wales often expressed a wish to meet the legendary fencer, Philippe approved Brissot's plan to dispatch Saint-Georges to London.

He considered Saint-Georges, a "man of color", the ideal person to contact his fellow abolitionists in London and ask their advice about Brissot's plans for Les Amis des Noirs (Friends of the Blacks) modeled on the English Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

Saint-Georges and his friend valiantly defended themselves and were providentially saved by the night watch and its men-at-arms: « M. de Saint Georges is a mulatto, that is to say the son of a negress […] Recently, during the night, he was attacked by six men, he was with one of his friends, they defended themselves to the best of their ability against sticks with which the fellows wanted to knock them down; there is even talk of a pistol shot which was heard: the lookout occurred & prevented the consequences of this assassination, - so that Mr. de Saint Georges is freed for bruises & minor injuries; he even shows himself already in the world.

The sponsor of this aggression would be a famous actor, named Gourgaud said Dugazon, the husband of Louise-Rosalie Lefebvre, gifted vocalist, which had made its debut in Paris in "Ernestine" the opera by Saint-Georges.

[59] A painting by Abbé Alexandre-Auguste Robineau, violinist-composer, and painter, showed the Prince and his entourage watching Mlle D'Éon score a hit on Saint-Georges, giving rise to rumors that the Frenchman allowed it out of gallantry for a lady.

[92] It is supposed he delivered Brissot's request to translate the publications of the abolitionists MPs William Wilberforce, John Wilkes, and Reverend Thomas Clarkson into French.

[58] On 5 May 1789, the opening day of the fateful Estates General, Saint-Georges, standing in the gallery with Laclos, heard Jacques Necker, Louis XVI's minister of finance, saying, "The slave trade is a barbarous practice and must be eliminated.

[110] The singer Louise Fusil, who had idolized Saint-Georges since she was a girl of 15, wrote: "In 1791, I stopped in Amiens where St. Georges and Lamothe were waiting for me, committed to giving some concerts over the Easter holidays.

"[112] According to a report by a local newspaper: "The dining room of the hotel where St. Georges, a citizen of France, was also staying, refused to serve him, but he remained perfectly calm; remarkable for a man with his means to defend himself.

Its three parts depicted the little bird greeting the spring; passionately pursuing the object of his love, who alas, has chosen another; its voice grows weaker then, after the last sigh, it is stilled forever.

This kind of program music or sound painting of scenarios such as love scenes, tempests, or battles complete with cannonades and the cries of the wounded, conveyed by a lone violin, was by that time nearly forgotten.

On 7 September 1792 Julien Raimond, leader of a delegation of free men of color from Saint-Domingue (Haiti), petitioned the National Assembly to authorize the formation of a military legion of volunteers.

Historians have found to this day no trace of St. Georges in the press of the time, or in the archives of the manifests of ships bound for French ports for Saint-Domingue or making trips back in France.

[180] Concerned about his old colonel's condition, he stopped by Chevalier's small flat on rue de Chartres-Saint-Honoré and, having found him dying and alone, took him to his apartment where he stayed and was cared for until his death.

[186][187] Saint-Georges, influenced by the prevailing sentimental style wrote twelve violin concertos, two symphonies, and eight symphony-concertantes, a new, intrinsically Parisian genre of which he was one of the chief exponents.

Some French journalists such as Alain Guédé [fr] have asserted without evidence that Saint-Georges' scores were purposefully burned because of his skin color, or even that Napoleon banned his music from being performed.

Six Italian Canzonettas by a Signor di Giorgio, for voice, keyboard or harp, and The Mona Melodies, a collection of ancient airs from the Isle of Man, in the British Library, are not by Saint-Georges.

la comtesse de Vauban erroneously subtitled "Trios" (they are solos and duos), a collection of individual movements, some for piano alone, deserves the same doubts as the Recueil d'Airs pour Mme.