The age enlightened by the genius of Pascal was ready to discuss the question then at hand, on the comparative merits of Ancients and Moderns, involving an inquiry into the principles of Progress, particularly in art and literature. The close of the seventeenth century witnessed this memorable debate, which extended from France to England. French critics, under the lead of Boileau, espoused the cause of the Ancients. Against them was Charles Perrault, conspicuous at the time among academicians, and still remembered as author of those Fairy Tales, including "Cinderella" and "Bluebeard," which have given him a fame not inferior to that of his brother, Claude Perrault, with whom he is sometimes confounded, to whom France is indebted for that perpetual triumph in architecture, the unsurpassed front of the Louvre. In an elaborate work, published in 1688-92, entitled "Parallel between the Ancients and Moderns in regard to the Arts and Sciences,"[252] where the debate is in the form of dialogue, he vindicates the Moderns in comparison with the Ancients, and insists, that, notwithstanding the perfection at which the latter arrived, the Moderns have an advantage from prolonged experience and its necessary accumulations. Like Pascal, whose remarkable words were still unpublished, he, too, sees the life of Humanity _as the life of an individual man eternal_, and, though recognizing epochs of retrogression in history, asserts the continuous progress of the race, not only in the sciences, but also in morals and the arts, not forgetting the art of the kitchen. [252] Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes, en ce qui regarde les Arts et les Sciences.