he best-liked personages of his own great age,
and he has remained ever since a prime favourite of mankind. We are
fortunate in knowing a great deal about his varied life, deriving our
knowledge mainly from D'Alembert's history of the French Academy and
from his own memoirs, which were written for his grandchildren, but
not published till sixty-six years after his death. We should, I
think, be more fortunate still if the memoirs had not ceased in
mid-career, or if their author had permitted himself to write of his
family affairs without reserve or restraint, in the approved manner of
modern autobiography. We should like, for example, to know much more
than we do about the wife and the two sons to whom he was so devoted._

_Perrault was born in Paris in 1628, the fifth son of Pierre Perrault,
a prosperous parliamentary lawyer; and, at the age of nine, was sent
to a day-school--the College de Beauvais. His father helped him with
his lessons at home, as he himself, later on, was accustomed to help
his own children. He can never have been a model schoolboy, though he
was always first in his class, and he ended his school career
prematurely by quarrelling with his master and bidding him a formal
farewell._

_The cause of this quarrel throws a bright light on Perraults
subsequent career. He refused to accept his teacher's philosophical
tenets on the mere ground of their traditional authority. He claimed
that novelty was in itself a merit, and on this they parted. He did
not go alone. One of his friends, a boy called Beaurain, espoused his
cause, and for the next three or four years the two read together,
haphazard, in the Luxembourg Gardens. This plan of study had almost
certainly a bad effect on Beaurain, for we hear no more of him. It
certainly prevented Perrault from being a thorough scholar, though it
made him a man of taste, a sincere independent, and an undaunted
amateur._

_In 1651 he took his degree at the University of Orleans, where
degrees were given with scandalous readiness, payment of fees being
the only essential preliminary. In the mean-time he had walked the
hospitals with some vague notion of following his brother Claude into
the profession of medicine, and had played a small part as a
theological controversialist in the quarrel then raging, about the
nature of grace, between the Jesuits and the Jansenists. Having
abandoned medicine and theology he got called to the Bar, practised
for a while with distin