ct success, and coquetted with a notion of
codifying the laws of the realm. The Bar proved too arid a profession
to engage for long his attention; so he next sought and found a place
in the office of another brother, Pierre, who was Chief Commissioner
of Taxes in Paris. Here Perrault had little to do save to read at
large in the excellent library which his brother had formed._

_For want of further occupation he returned to the writing of verse,
one of the chief pleasures of his boyhood. His first sustained
literary effort had been a parody of the sixth book of the "Aeneid";
which, perhaps fortunately for his reputation, was never published and
has not survived. Beaurain and his brother Nicholas, a doctor of the
Sorbonne, assisted him in this perpetration, and Claude made the
pen-and-ink sketches with which it was illustrated. In the few years
that had elapsed since the writing of this burlesque Perrault had
acquired more sense and taste, and his new poems--in particular the
"Portrait d'Iris" and the "Dialogue entre l'Amour et l'Amitie"--were
found charming by his contemporaries. They were issued anonymously,
and Quinault, himself a poet of established reputation, used some of
them to forward his suit with a young lady, allowing her to think that
they were his own. Perrault, when told of Quinault's pretensions,
deemed it necessary to disclose his authorship; but, on hearing of the
use to which his work had been put, he gallantly remained in the
background, forgave the fraud, and made a friend of the culprit._

_Architecture next engaged his attention, and in 1657 he designed a
house at Viry for his brother and supervised its construction. Colbert
approved so much of this performance that he employed him in the
superintendence of the royal buildings and put him in special charge
of Versailles, which was then in process of erection. Perrault flung
himself with ardour into this work, though not to the exclusion of his
other activities. He wrote odes in honour of the King; he planned
designs for Gobelin tapestries and decorative paintings; he became a
member of the select little Academy of Medals and Inscriptions which
Colbert brought into being to devise suitable legends for the royal
palaces and monuments; he encouraged musicians and fought the cause of
Lulli; he joined with Claude in a successful effort to found the
Academy of Science._

_Claude Perrault had something of his brother's versatility and shared
his love f