Ever since the mathematicians managed to penetrate into the innermost of feminine sanctuaries, and, with the aid of the Mercure Galant, to bring with them the terminology of a science as solid and serious as mathematics, we hear that Cupid’s empire is rapidly crumbling, and that no one talks now of anything but problems, corollaries, theorems, right-angles, obtuse angles, rhomboids, and so on. It reports that quite recently there were two young ladies in Paris whose heads had been so turned by this branch of learning that one of them declined to listen to a proposal of marriage unless the candidate for her hand undertook to learn how to make telescopes, so often talked of in the Mercure Galant; while the other young lady positively refused a perfectly eligible suitor simply because he had been unable, within a given time, to produce any new idea about “squaring the circle.”
