[16] During a visit to London to celebrate his election to the John Donne Club, St. Léger met the Anglo-Polish writer Joseph Conrad, which greatly encouraged him to pursue a career in poetry.

The Anabase was widely ignored upon publication, but was praised by various poets such as T. S. Eliot, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Rainer Maria Rilke as a poem of much visionary power.

[24] St. Léger wrote Briand "had no need of duplicity or violence to win...He hated equally stupidity, cowardice, clumsiness and vulgarity...He hunted with the lightest arms and fished with the finest lines...He brought the refinement of the artist".

[26] St. Léger was described by the British historian D.C. Watt as the "cold genius" of the Quai d'Orsay, a brilliant diplomat whose intelligence and ruthlessness made him invaluable to successive French foreign ministers over an eight-year period.

[32] The eccentric St. Leger was especially noted for his obsession with writing long erotic poems which circulated as manuscripts among his friends celebrating the beauty and sensuality of women and the joys of sex, on which he spent a disproportionate amount of time.

The diplomat Jean Chauvel wrote that he would appear at the Quai d'Orsay "wearing a narrow black tie, with a pasty face, a veiled look in his eyes, using elegant and refined language in a low voice".

[33] Morand wrote: "I admire his modesty, his broad sweeping views, his elevated and active mind, his playful imagination and mature wisdom like that of an elderly man, his selflessness, his secret life, his unfurnished apartments filled with trunks and his nomadic childhood".

St. Léger favored having the League General Assembly "approve" and "adopt" the Lytton report, but then leave the resolution of the Sino-Japanese dispute to the mediation by the powers that had signed the 9-Power Treaty of 1922 plus Germany and the Soviet Union.

Besides for a general hostility towards western values shown by the Japanese state, St. Léger wrote that even more disturbing were the claims of an "Asian Monroe Doctrine" in which all of Asia was considered to be Japan's sphere of influence.

[40] Barthou's successor, Pierre Laval sough an alliance with Italy and was prepared to cede the Aouzou Strip of French Equatorial Africa to the Italian colony of Libya to win the friendship of Benito Mussolini.

[50] St. Léger noted the remiliziation of the Rhineland altered the balance of power decisively in favor of the Reich by exposing France once again to the threat of German invasion and by allowing Germany to refortify the Franco-German border.

[50] In his "political testament" written after his return from London, St. Léger wrote that war was "inevitable" as he predicated that Germany would refortify the Franco-German border and invade France's allies in Eastern Europe, secure in the knowledge that the Rhineland would be protected from a French offensive.

[58] The conference ended with a plan being adopted to see it if was possible for King Carol II of Romania to allow the Red Army transit rights across Romania to aid Czechoslovakia in the event of a German invasion, which in turn led to Coulondre and Thierry being assigned to find a way to end the Bessarabia dispute as Carol would not allow the Red Army to enter his kingdom as long as the Soviet Union continued to claim Bessarabia.

[68] When Germany violated the Munich Agreement on 15 March 1939 by occupying the Czech half of Czecho-Slovakia which was turned into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, St. Léger was outraged and argued that Robert Coulondre, the ambassador in Berlin, should be recalled in protest to show the Germans "the seriousness of the situation".

[69] St. Léger further predicated that Beck would follow his usual "hand-to-mouth policy" and moved closer to the Reich when the Chamberlain government refused to "undertake a definite commitment" to defend Poland.

[70] St. Léger sent a long letter to both the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and the prime minister Neville Chamberlain that denounced Colonel Beck as a ruthless, unscrupulous and devious opportunist whose word was not to be trusted and who was about to ally Poland to the Reich.

[69] Starting on 18 March 1939, St. Léger took to cultivating American public opinion by using 25, 000 francs to cover the travel expense to send out various English-speaking French cultural figures such as André Maurois, Ève Curie, Jules Romains, and Georges Duhamel to tour the United States.

[72] St. Léger knew from the reports of the Deuxième Bureau that the Chamberlain government was deeply worried about the prospect of Japan taking advantage of a war in Europe to seize Britain's Asian colonies and threaten Australia and New Zealand, and wanted American support in the Pacific.

[73] Prying on American stereotypes of Britain, St. Léger told Bullitt that pressure from the city had led Chamberlain to decide to send the main part of the Royal Navy to Singapore (the major British naval base in Asia) and accordingly the Danzig crisis was more likely to end in war.

St. Léger called the Pope's mediation offer a power play by Mussolini, and stated that Cardinal Maglione, the right-hand man of the Pontiff, was acting as an Italian rather as an agent of the Vatican.

[83] During his stop-over in Paris, Halifax was confronted by Daladier, Bonnet and St. Léger who told him very firmly that only a military alliance with the Soviet Union could stop Germany from invading Poland, and warned him if Chamberlain continued his foot-dragging, the result would be war in 1939.

In a memo, St. Léger wrote that Benito Mussolini had evidently decided upon alignment with Germany and that: "Every effort to bring them [the Italians] back to us is destined to fail; it will only encourage them in their two-faced policy, leading them to name the highest price for their assets and making them value even more highly the benefits the Axis could offer them".

[94] In common with other French officials, St. Léger was very much enraged at Colonel Beck who was completely against allowing the Red Army to enter Poland if Germany should invade while the Soviets insisted on such transit rights as the precondition for the "peace front".

In an effort to sabotage Bonnet's plans, St. Léger had Corbin tell Lord Halifax later on the afternoon of 1 September that the British and French governments should place a time limit on Mussolini's proposed conference, saying that otherwise the Germans would stall and the war would continue.

[101] When the declaration of war was finally drafted by Bonnet, it evaded the expression la guerre and instead spoke in convoluted terms that France "would fulfil those obligations contracted towards Poland, which the German government is aware of".

[37] Relations between France and Britain were often strained during the winter of 1939–1940 and in March 1940 Daladier told St. Léger "that what had really taken the stuffing out of him was his loss of faith in his ability ever to induce the British government to take prompt action or a firm line".

[108] Georges Mandel, the minister of colonies, was opposed to St. Léger's sacking, telling Reynaud that firing a senior diplomat well known for his anti-Nazi views, was sending the wrong message.

[25] He travelled extensively, observing nature and enjoying the friendship of US Attorney General Francis Biddle and his spouse, philanthropist Beatrice Chanler,[111] and author Katherine Garrison Chapin.

Since he was an almost obsessively private person, it only became generally known only after his death he had relied upon a few carefully selected friends both for advice and support in his public responsibilities and for regular exchanges on the intellectual and aesthetic matters that were his main recreation and pleasure".

[120] A few months before he died, Leger donated his library, manuscripts and private papers to Fondation Saint-John Perse, a research centre devoted to his life and work (Cité du Livre, Aix-en-Provence), which remains active to the present day.