One year Kou Chien sent a delegation to Fu Chai: they wanted to know if he would accept a gift of two beautiful maidens as part of the tribute. Fu Chai was curious, and accepted the offer. The women arrived a few days later, amid much anticipation, and the king received them in his palace. The two approached the throne—their hair was magnificently coiffured, in what was called “the cloud-cluster” style, ornamented with pearl ornaments and kingfisher feathers. As they walked, jade pendants hanging from their girdles made the most delicate sound. The air was full of some delightful perfume. The king was extremely pleased. The beauty of one of the girls far surpassed that of the other; her name was Hsi Shih. She looked him in the eye without a hint of shyness; in fact she was confident and coquettish, something he was not used to seeing in such a young girl.

Fu Chai called for festivities to commemorate the occasion. The halls of the palace filled with revelers; inflamed with wine, Hsi Shih danced before the king. She sang, and her voice was beautiful. Reclining on a couch of white jade, she looked like a goddess. The king could not leave her side. The next day he followed her everywhere. To his astonishment, she was witty, sharp, and knowledgeable, and could quote the classics better than he could. When he had to leave her to deal with royal affairs, his mind was full of her image. Soon he brought her with him to his councils, asking her advice on important matters. She told him to listen less to his ministers; he was wiser than they were, his judgment superior.

Hsi Shih’s power grew daily. Yet she was not easy to please; if the king failed to grant some wish of hers, tears would fill her eyes, his heart would melt, and he would yield. One day she begged him to build her a palace outside the capital. Of course, he obliged her. And when he visited the palace, he was astounded at its magnificence, even though he had paid the bills: Hsi Shih had filled it with the most extravagant furnishings. The grounds contained an artificial lake with marble bridges crossing over it. Fu Chai spent more and more time here, sitting by a pool and watching Hsi Shih comb her hair, using the pool as a mirror. He would watch her playing with her birds, in their jeweled cages, or simply walking through the palace, for she moved like a willow in the breeze. The months went by; he stayed in the palace. He missed councils, ignored his family and friends, neglected his public functions. He lost track of time. When a delegation came to talk to him of urgent matters, he was too distracted to listen. If anything but Hsi Shih took up his time, he worried unbearably that she would be angry.

Finally word reached him of a growing crisis: the fortune he had spent on the palace had bankrupted the treasury, and the people were discontented. He returned to the capital, but it was too late: an army from the kingdom of Yueh had invaded Wu, and had reached the capital. All was lost. Fu Chai had no time to rejoin his beloved Hsi Shih. Instead of letting himself be captured by the king of Yueh, the man who had once served in his stables, he committed suicide.

Little did he know that Kou Chien had plotted this invasion for years, and that Hsi Shih’s elaborate seduction was the main part of his plan.

Kou Chien found the most beautiful maiden in his realm. For three years he had her trained in all of the arts—not just singing, dancing, and calligraphy, but how to dress, how to talk, how to play the coquette. And it worked: Hsi Shih did not allow Fu Chai a moment’s rest. Everything about her was exotic and unfamiliar. The more attention he paid to her hair, her moods, her glances, the way she moved, the less he thought about diplomacy and war. He was driven to distraction.

All of us today are kings protecting the tiny realm of our own lives, weighed down by all kinds of responsibilities, surrounded by ministers and advisers. A wall forms around us—we are immune to the influence of other people, because we are so preoccupied. Like Hsi Shih, then, you must lure your targets away, gently, slowly, from the affairs that fill their mind. And what will best lure them from their castles is the whiff of the exotic. Offer something unfamiliar that will fascinate them and hold their attention. Be different in your manners and appearance, and slowly envelop them in this different world of yours. Keep your targets off balance with coquettish changes of mood. Do not worry that the disruption you represent is making them emotional—that is a sign of their growing weakness. Most people are ambivalent: on the one hand they feel comforted by their habits and duties, on the other they are bored, and ripe for anything that seems exotic, that seems to come from somewhere else. They may struggle or have doubts, but exotic pleasures are irresistible. The more you can get them into your world, the weaker they become. As with the king of Wu, by the time they realize what has happened, it is too late.

Rita stopped first at the French Riviera. Invitations poured in, particularly from wealthy men, for at the time she was considered the most beautiful woman in the world. Aristotle Onassis and the Shah of Iran telephoned her almost daily, begging for a date. She turned them all down. A few days after her arrival, though, she received an invitation from Elsa Maxwell, the society hostess, who was giving a little party in Cannes. Rita balked but Maxwell insisted, telling her to buy a new dress, show up a little late, and make a grand entrance.

Rita played along, and arrived at the party wearing a white Grecian gown, her red hair falling over her bare shoulders. She was greeted by a reaction she had grown used to: all conversation stopped as both men and women turned in their chairs, the men gazing in amazement, the women jealous. A man hurried to her side and escorted her to her table. It was thirty-seven-year-old Prince Aly Khan, the son of the Aga Khan III, who was the worldwide leader of the Islamic Ismaili sect and one of the richest men in the world. Rita had been warned about Aly Khan, a notorious rake. To her dismay, they were seated next to each other, and he never left her side. He asked her a million questions—about Hollywood, her interests, on and on. She began to relax a little and open up. There were other beautiful women there, princesses, actresses, but Aly Khan ignored them all, acting as if Rita were the only woman there. He led her onto the dance floor, and though he was an expert dancer, she felt uncomfortable—he held her a little too close. Still, when he offered to drive her back to her hotel, she agreed. They sped along the Grande Corniche; it was a beautiful night. For one evening she had managed to forget her many problems, and she was grateful, but she was still in love with Welles, and an affair with a rake like Aly Khan was not what she needed.

Aly Khan had to fly off on business for a few days; he begged her to stay at the Riviera until he got back. While he was away, he telephoned constantly. Every morning a giant bouquet of flowers arrived. On the telephone he seemed particularly annoyed that the Shah of Iran was trying hard to see her, and he made her promise to break the date to which she had finally agreed. During this time, a gypsy fortune-teller visited the hotel, and Rita agreed to have her fortune read. “You are about to embark on the greatest romance of your life,” the gypsy told her. “He is somebody you already know.... You must relent and give in to him totally. Only if you do that will you find happiness at long last.” Not knowing who this man could be, Rita, who had a weakness for the occult, decided to extend her stay. Aly Khan came back; he told her that his château overlooking the Mediterranean was the perfect place to escape from the press and forget her troubles, and that he would behave himself. She relented. Life in the château was like a fairy tale; wherever she turned, his Indian helpers were there to attend to her every wish. At night he would take her into his enormous ballroom, where they would dance all by themselves. Could this be the man the fortune-teller meant?

Aly Khan invited his friends over to meet her. Among this strange company she felt alone again, and depressed; she decided to leave the château. Just then, as if he had read her thoughts, Aly Khan whisked her off to Spain, the country that fascinated her most. The press caught on to the affair, and began to hound them in Spain: Rita had had a daughter with Welles—was this any way for a mother to act? Aly Khan’s reputation did not help, but he stood by her, shielding her from the press as best he could. Now she was more alone than ever, and more dependent on him.

Near the end of the trip, Aly Khan proposed to Rita. She turned him down; she did not think he was the kind of man you married. He followed her to Hollywood, where her former friends were less friendly than before. Thank God she had Aly Khan to help her. A year later she finally succumbed, abandoning her career, moving to Aly Khan’s château, and marrying him.

It was not Aly Khan’s wealth or looks that made him a great seducer. He was not in fact very handsome, and his wealth was more than offset by his bad reputation. His success was strategic: he isolated his victims, working so slowly and subtly that they did not notice it. The intensity of his attention made a woman feel that in his eyes, at that moment, she was the only woman in the world. This isolation was experienced as pleasure; the woman did not notice her growing dependence, how the way he filled up her mind with his attention slowly isolated her from her friends and her milieu. Her natural suspicions of the man were drowned out by his intoxicating effect on her ego. Aly Khan almost always capped off his seductions by taking the woman to some enchanted place on the globe—a place that he knew well, but where the woman felt lost.

Do not give your targets the time or space to worry about, suspect, or resist you. Flood them with the kind of attention that crowds out all other thoughts, concerns, and problems. Remember—people secretly yearn to be led astray by someone who knows where they are going. It can be a pleasure to let go, and even to feel isolated and weak, if the seduction is done slowly and gracefully.

A target who is strong and settled is hard to seduce. But even the strongest people can be made vulnerable if you can isolate them from their nests and safety nets. Block out their friends and family with your constant presence, alienate them from the world they are used to, and take them to places they do not know Get them to spend time in your environment. Deliberately disturb their habits, get them to do things they have never done. They will grow emotional, making it easier to lead them astray. Disguise all this in the form of a pleasurable experience, and your targets will wake up one day distanced from everything that normally comforts them. Then they will turn to you for help, like a child crying out for its mother when the lights are turned out. In seduction, as in warfare, the isolated target is weak and vulnerable.

In Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, written in 1748, the rake Lovelace is attempting to seduce the novel’s beautiful heroine. Clarissa is young, virtuous, and very much protected by her family. But Lovelace is a conniving seducer. First he courts Clarissa’s sister, Arabella. A match between them seems likely. Then he suddenly switches attention to Clarissa, playing on sibling rivalry to make Arabella furious. Their brother, James, is angered by Lovelace’s change in sentiments; he fights with Lovelace and is wounded. The whole family is in an uproar, united against Lovelace, who, however, manages to smuggle letters to Clarissa, and to visit her when she is at the house of a friend. The family finds out, and accuses her of disloyalty. Clarissa is innocent; she has not encouraged Lovelace’s letters or visits. But now her parents are determined to marry her off, to a rich older man. Alone in the world, about to be married to a man she finds repulsive, she turns to Lovelace as the only one who can save her from this mess. Eventually he rescues her by getting her to London, where she can escape this dreaded marriage, but where she is also hopelessly isolated. In these circumstances her feelings toward him soften. All of this has been masterfully orchestrated by Lovelace himself—the turmoil within the family, Clarissa’s eventual alienation from them, the whole scenario.

Your worst enemies in a seduction are often your targets’ family and friends. They are outside your circle and immune to your charms; they may provide a voice of reason to the seduced. You must work silently and subtly to alienate the target from them. Insinuate that they are jealous of your target’s good fortune in finding you, or that they are parental figures who have lost a taste for adventure. The latter argument is extremely effective with young people, whose identities are in flux and who are more than ready to rebel against any authority figure, particularly their parents. You represent excitement and life; the friends and parents represent habit and boredom.

In Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of King Richard III, Richard, when still the Duke of Gloucester, has murdered King Henry VI and his son, Prince Edward. Shortly thereafter he accosts Lady Anne, Prince Edward’s widow, who knows what he has done to the two men closest to her, and who hates him as much as a woman can hate. Yet Richard attempts to seduce her. His method is simple: he tells her that what he did, he did because of his love for her. He wanted there to be no one in her life but him. His feelings were so strong he was driven to murder. Of course Lady Anne not only resists this line of reasoning, she abhors him. But he persists. Anne is at a moment of extreme vulnerability—alone in the world, with no one to support her, at the height of grief. Incredibly, his words begin to have an effect.

Murder is not a seductive tactic, but the seducer does enact a kind of killing—a psychological one. Our past attachments are a barrier to the present. Even people we have left behind can continue to have a hold on us. As a seducer you will be held up to the past, compared to previous suitors, perhaps found inferior. Do not let it get to that point. Crowd out the past with your attentions in the present. If necessary, find ways to disparage their previous lovers—subtly or not so subtly, depending on the situation. Even go so far as to open old wounds, making them feel old pain and seeing by contrast how much better the present is. The more you can isolate them from their past, the deeper they will sink with you into the present.

The principle of isolation can be taken literally by whisking the target off to an exotic locale. This was Aly Khan’s method; a secluded island worked best, and indeed islands, cut off from the rest of the world, have always been associated with the pursuit of sensual pleasures. The Roman Emperor Tiberius descended into debauchery once he made his home on the island of Capri. The danger of travel is that your targets are intimately exposed to you—it is hard to maintain an air of mystery. But if you take them to a place alluring enough to distract them, you will prevent them from focusing on anything banal in your character. Cleopatra lured Julius Caesar into taking a voyage down the Nile. Moving deeper into Egypt, he was further isolated from Rome, and Cleopatra was all the more seductive. The early-twentieth-century lesbian seductress Natalie Barney had an on-again-off-again affair with the poet Renée Vivien; to regain her affections, she took Renée on a trip to the island of Lesbos, a place Natalie had visited many times. In doing so she not only isolated Renée but disarmed and distracted her with the associations of the place, the home of the legendary lesbian poet Sappho. Vivien even began to imagine that Natalie was Sappho herself. Do not take the target just anywhere; pick the place that will have the most effective associations.

The seductive power of isolation goes beyond the sexual realm. When new adherents joined Mahatma Gandhi’s circle of devoted followers, they were encouraged to cut off their ties with the past—with their family and friends. This kind of renunciation has been a requirement of many religious sects over the centuries. People who isolate themselves in this way are much more vulnerable to influence and persuasion. A charismatic politician feeds off and even encourages people’s feelings of alienation. John F. Kennedy did this to great effect when he subtly disparaged the Eisenhower years; the comfort of the 1950s, he implied, compromised American ideals. He invited Americans to join him in a new life, on a “New Frontier,” full of danger and excitement. It was an extremely seductive lure, particularly for the young, who were Kennedy’s most enthusiastic supporters.

Finally, at some point in the seduction there must be a hint of danger in the mix. Your targets should feel that they are gaining a great adventure in following you, but are also losing something—a part of their past, their cherished comfort, Actively encourage these ambivalent feelings. An element of fear is the proper spice; although too much fear is debilitating, in small doses it makes us feel alive. Like diving out of an airplane, it is exciting, a thrill, at the same time that it is a little frightening. And the only person there to break the fall, or catch them, is you.