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If the bigshot painter in town made a girl his favorite, the others would definitely grow jealous to some degree. That being said, the biggest concern for a courtesan was jealousy from her co-workers. The vast majority of mistresses that nobles and such ended up claiming were actually courtesans. Of course, Paola's joint is definitely rather fancy, so maybe I'm just trying to overly scrutinize or something.
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The ones we see in-game aren't bottom-rung-looking trollops, per se, but they don't really fit how I see courtesans in paintings and such. This grated on society enough to pass several laws over the years to make courtesans more apparent (ie: not allowed to wear jewelry, etc). They'd go home and crow about "makin' it" with a noble. Foreigners would breeze through, sleep with one of these ladies, and never find out they were, in fact, prostitutes. As a result of them carrying themselves so well in society, it was pretty common to mistake one of them for a noblewoman.
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Courtesans were almost like geisha over in Japan they were incredibly talented at a number of skills and very well cultured, in addition to being prostitutes. Ubisoft, I think (in an attempt to assign a euphemism to these ladies) did a bit of a blanket naming convention here. A social tier system arose inside of prostitution, the top of which being a courtesan. HOOKER NOTES YEEHAW posted: Due to the advent of more sophisticated economic structures, prostitution became rather accepted to some degree (compared to previously, when it was reserved for low-tier people in society, or even slaves).