Unfortunately, his memoirs are not comprehensive, ending as they do at the mid-point of his career, and failing to provide the unrestrained and unreserved account of his family life that would be expected in a modern autobiography. There is little to be learned from this document about his wife and his two beloved sons, for example.

Perrault was born in Paris on 12 January 1628, the fifth son of Pierre Perrault, a successful and prosperous parliamentary lawyer. When he was nine years old he was sent to Beauvais College, a day school. His father helped him with his studies at home, as Perrault himself would later help his own children. Although the boy was clever, excelling in the composition of verse, and was always first in his class, he was never a model schoolboy. His education at Beauvais came to a premature end when he quarrelled with a teacher and left the school.

The cause of this quarrel provides an insight into Perrault’s subsequent career. He refused to accept his teacher’s philosophical arguments merely on the grounds that they were traditional, maintaining that his own arguments were better ‘because they were new’. Perrault did not leave the school alone. One of his friends, a boy called Beaurain, supported him, and for the next two or three years they invented a course of study for themselves, reading together in the Tuileries Gardens whenever the mood took them. This haphazard style of education certainly didn’t benefit Beaurain, of whom little more was ever heard. Moreover, it didn’t give Perrault a studying habit, although he was always a man of discernment with an independent mind, and an enthusiastic amateur.

In 1651 Perrault was awarded a degree by the University of Orléans, an institution reputed to grant degrees with what has been described as a ‘scandalous readiness’, the payment of fees being the only necessary requisite. In the meantime, he had entertained a vague notion of following his brother Claude into the medical profession, and he had also participated in the theological controversy, centred on the nature of grace, then raging between the Jesuits and Jansenists.

Having abandoned medicine and theology, the young man next turned his attention to the law and was called to the bar within a month of taking his degree. He practised with some success for a while, and even toyed with the idea of codifying the laws of France. However, the legal profession soon proved too dry and dusty to hold his attention, and he found a position in the office of another brother, Pierre, who was Chief Commissioner of Taxes for Paris. There was little work for him to do, so he used his time reading extensively in his brother’s excellent library.

Not having anything else with which to occupy himself, he soon returned to the writing of verse, which had been one of his main boyhood pleasures. His first sustained literary effort was a parody of Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid. He was assisted in his task by his schoolfriend Beaurain and Beaurain’s brother Nicolas, a doctor of the Sorbonne. Perrault’s brother Claude drew the pen and ink sketches with which it was illustrated. Fortunately for Perrault’s reputation, perhaps, this work was never published and has not survived. He subsequently developed some sense and taste, and his new poems, particularly the ‘Portrait d’Iris’ and the ‘Dialogue entre l’Amour et l’Amitié’ were well received by his contemporaries, who considered them charming. They were published anonymously, and Philippe Quinault, himself a poet with an established reputation, used some of them to press his suit with a young woman, allowing her to believe that they were his own. When Perrault was told about this, he revealed himself as the author of the poems, but when he heard about how his work had been used, he decided not to come forward. He forgave the fraud that had been perpetrated and he and Quinault became friends.

The next profession to engage Perrault’s attention was architecture. In 1657 he designed a house at Viry for his brother and supervised its construction. Louis XIV’s finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was so impressed that he employed Perrault as superintendent of the royal buildings, and put him in special charge of Versailles, then in the process of construction. Perrault threw himself enthusiastically into this work, although not to the exclusion of his other activities: he wrote odes in honour of the king; planned designs for Gobelin tapestries and decorative paintings; became a member of the Academy of Medals and Inscriptions, founded by Colbert to devise suitable inscriptions for the royal palaces and monuments; encouraged musicians and lent his support to the court composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who was at the centre of several romantic scandals. He also teamed up with his brother Claude in a successful initiative to found the Academy of Science.

Claude Perrault had something of Charles’s versatility and shared his love of architecture, and the brothers now became very involved in the various schemes that were mooted for the completion of the palace of the Louvre. The king summoned the sculptor Bernini from Rome and entrusted him with the task, but the Perrault brothers intervened. Charles conceived the idea of the great eastern elevation, while Claude drew the plans and was commissioned to execute them. The work was completed in 1671, and it is still popularly known as Perrault’s Colonnade.

In 1671 Perrault was also elected to the French Academy, an honour that, unusually, was bestowed without any canvassing by him on his own behalf.