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know what to wear—and when. And for flirtation, of course, essential to
all her other accomplishments, she had to have exquisite timing. There is
almost nothing she did that did not require this virtue. But we begin with the
activity most often associated with courtesans, perhaps because it is the one
with which so many began their careers: dance.
    The Way She Danced
    Then I started to dance, the way I have always danced.—
Josephine Baker, describing her debut at the Johann Strauss Theatre
    The moment was legendary. Before the music began, no one had heard of her.
But as she circled about the floor, her body moving up and down with a vitality
memorable even today, every eye in the dance hall was on her. As the polka beat
out its inexorable rhythms, the heat of attention only increased. When she and
her partner stopped dancing, the inevitable crowd of men surrounded her.
Because of the way she danced that night, her life would never be the same
again.
    Why was her dance so powerful? Philosophy pauses here. Though time is a
fascinating concept, it pales when you think of this scene. Even to begin to
answer the question, we will have to expand our vocabulary. Timing may serve to
describe the ability to coordinate desire and circumstance, yet it fails to
illuminate the mysterious bodily process by which these effects are achieved.
For this purpose, we must explore the concept of rhythm, too.
    Yet even this word needs some resuscitation. Perhaps because of the clock and
metronome, in contemporary thought we have come to mistake rhythm for a simple
mechanical activity. Even the dictionary makes this error, calling rhythm
“a procedure with the patterned occurrence of a beat.” But buried
deeply within the entries, you can find the word “cadence,” an
older term, with an appealing gloss and a far more sensual patina. And listed
third or fourth in the definitions of cadence there is an entry that serves
this exploration well: “the pattern in which something is experienced.
”
    Just think of the beat that underlies all that we do. Breathing, of course, is
almost too obvious. As is lovemaking, abundantly clear. But there are also
walking, eating, and even seeing, as the eyes dart about the room, or speaking,
as impulses and desires swim past and through consciousness, surface, and slide
away again. Whether by the subtle starts and stops of a conversation or the
inescapably loud punctuation provided by a pair of cymbals, rhythm shapes and
inspires every moment.
    The rhythm at the heart of dance is the same as the one that informs all
experience. The only way to move with a piece of music is to feel the rhythm as
it expands into your hips, your legs, your arms, your feet. Think for instance
of a line of Rockettes, or better yet, since many dancers from the Folies-
Bergère became courtesans, a circle of chorus girls from that show. If one
of them were to be off step, we would quickly sense her failure to feel the
music. Her performance would lack more than tempo. The spirit of both the music
and the dance would be missing, too. Her dance would be lackluster.
    The great French actress known as Rosay, who studied music as a child, referred
to rhythm as a form of energy. She used the word to describe the way actors go
beyond merely pretending to feel what the characters in a play are supposed to
feel. Instead, she said, an actor must actually experience the feeling. If the
courtesan was, to some degree, always acting, her success depended on how well
she could act, that is, on whether or not she actually experienced the feelings
she radiated. But this must have been what Rosay meant. When you find the right
tempo for any activity, whether it is eating or walking, talking, or making
love, you have also found the capacity to feel.
    In her
Mémoirs
, Céleste Vénard, the dancer known as
Mogador, claimed that she never wanted to be a courtesan. Even so, she must
have played the role with