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But even China was too timely for Leger. He explored the South Sea Islands in a boat. He traveled on horseback through the Gobi Desert, looking for the home of Genghis Khan, and the old silk roads from Sinkiang to Persia. He developed "a broadened gauge of space and time" in this "extraplanetary and extra-temporal" existence. When someone translated to him "the beautiful guttural sentence of a migrant lama: Man is born in the house, but he dies in the desert," Leger pondered over it rapturously for days. Later he was bumped down to earth when told that the saying meant simply that "A dying man must be exposed outside the tent so as not to soil the dwelling place of the living."
Meanwhile Leger's superiors enjoyed his brilliant diplomatic reports. Premier Aristide Briand called Leger to Washington to serve as Far Eastern expert at the Disarmament Conference of 1921-22, took him back to Paris with him.
Within two years Leger was Briand's Chief of Cabinet. For seven years the two men were an inseparable team. They would often talk quietly for hours, Briand puffing at his eternal cigaret, interjecting occasional remarks into his assistant's reports on international politics. They planned the Briand policy of Anglo-French accord as a basis for European peace, the Briand-Kellogg Pact, the Locarno Treaty.
Passionate Anonymity. After Briand died (1932) Leger was made Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, a post whose incumbent traditionally had a passion for anonymity and backstairs diplomacy. In Leger's hands the Secretary became more passionately anonymous than ever. Leger worked in a semisecret office up a backstairs in the Quai d'Orsay. He added infinite threads of oriental circumspection to the already tangled web of French diplomacy. But sometimes there were sensational news leaks, and Leger is believed to have contrived most of them himself. Most famous reputed "leak": news of the Hoare-Laval plan to partition Ethiopia.
Leger told Briand that he had abandoned poetry, that he had written it in the past as a joke. But in the evenings, France's Secretary for Foreign Affairs continued to versify. He never published these poems.
Among the few people who ever saw them were the Nazis. When France fell, a flying squad of Germans dashed to Leger's apartment in the Avenue de Camoëns (Leger had fled to Britain). The Nazis found only a copy of the Treaty of Versailles, and Leger's five volumes of manuscript poems. On the treaty the Nazis scrawled in bad French: "Grand Bien vous fasse a vous défenseur de la dernier victoire française!" ("A lot of good that does you, defender of France's last victory!") They burned the poems.
<footnote>Editor: French Poet Yvon Goll; price 50¢. </footnote>