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met her yet, you realize you are
wishing that you will soon. Later, when you see her talking with a small group
across the room, you are almost embarrassed at how often your eyes wander in
her direction. What is it about her? She is good-looking but not
extraordinarily so. No, it is something else that draws you. An air of
indefinable excitement that seems to radiate out in waves around her.
    You see that her presence affects those who are standing near her. The
atmosphere in that part of the room is distinctly electric. The way she is
dressed gives you a clue. She is wearing what looks like a man’s riding
jacket, only cut to follow the lines of her small body. Though the look is
eccentric, the style seems to place her at the very edge of the present moment.
And the look in her eyes, almost mocking, gives you the intriguing impression
that she is seeing just past the precipice of what is happening now, that she
is, in fact, fully aware of (and more than ready for) the moment which has not
quite arrived yet. Still, she has not given herself to the future. Fully here,
her movements and gestures are perfectly syncopated with the soundless rhythm
to which you suddenly realize the whole room is moving. As the air fairly
crackles around her, you begin to believe that she is helping to bring new
possibilities into being, including the new worlds that seem to have emerged in
your own imagination since the first moment you laid eyes on her. Only at the
end of the day do you learn that she is your host’s lover, a young woman
named Gabrielle. When, later, you hear her name spoken all over Paris, you are
not so surprised. What was it about her that was so extraordinary? Her timing
was brilliant.
    Still, as compelling as a woman with good timing is, the question remains: Why
should this virtue be placed first in our catalogue? Asked what could make a
woman so attractive that a man would be willing to spend a small fortune to
keep her, one might in all likelihood think of beauty first, to be followed
quickly by wit, or that talent indispensable to the art of seduction known as
charm. As appealing as it is, timing may not even be on the list.
    Yet, of all the virtues a great courtesan had to possess, good timing was
perhaps the most crucial. Indeed, her very existence depended on it. Had she
not been able to move in perfect synchrony with history, no woman would ever
have been able to enter the profession. Whether it was poverty or scandal that
she faced, her genius was to turn difficult circumstances to immense profit and
pleasure. She did the right thing at the right time.
    Regarding survival, the best choice to be made at one moment will, in another
period, not even be a good choice. All things considered, it would not be a
wise choice for most women to become courtesans today. Indeed, the ingredients
required to become one no longer exist. A courtesan occupied a precise place in
society; as independent as she was, circumstance defined her. If, in the middle
of the twentieth century,
    Helen Gurley Brown, future editor in chief of
Cosmopolitan
magazine,
was kept by a wealthy movie producer, she was not called a courtesan. Like the
atmosphere that created the tradition, the word had already become an
anachronism.
    Just as Venus arose from the sea instead of a lake or a river, the courtesan
emerged from a very particular medium. The waters of her birth, salted by the
bitter tears of women who were condemned to penury and by those of wealthy and
poor women alike who lamented the rules that limited and constrained their
erotic lives, were made up of a perfect blend of injustice and prudery. The
genius of the courtesan was in how she turned the same ingredients to her
advantage. Considering the distribution of power between men and women in the
times during which she lived, to say that she turned the tables would be an
understatement. If we ponder very long the fact, for instance, that La