By Stephen Weeks

I was sitting in the Café Louvre yesterday and the person I was meeting clearly needed some local information I didn't know. I rang my girlfriend: They want to know how to get to Beroun, I found myself saying. They intend to spend Saturday afternoon there. The person opposite me adopted a slightly quizzical look: "They"?

It was a useful shortcut. If I had told my girlfriend that they was in fact an attractive female professor from Toronto, on her own, then I would have had to swear I'd seen her notarized affidavit stating she was still married, and an authenticated letter of assurance that her husband was eagerly awaiting her return. Czech girls are fiercely competitive and don't miss a thing. I'd obviously have to invent this husband more concretely for later on.

As the new — and Czech — Miss World, Taťána Kuchařová, proves, one can have beauty and brains. I once knew an Italian girl who was, shall we say, an airhead. She was absurdly beautiful and well-endowed. She liked nothing more than flaunting her all, and bending over to adjust the straps on her strappy shoes to reveal something frilly. She was so extraordinarily made that I wondered if she'd escaped from some computer game, if she wasn't really just virtual — a hologram and nothing more.

But I soon tired of her. She couldn't climb over gates to castle parks, or would get her spike heels stuck in muddy fields, or would simply giggle at the news. Why did I get so weary, I wondered? Was it because eating a diet consisting only of cream cakes quickly makes one sick? Or did I really hanker for brains, after all?

Czech girls come dressed for combat. Many like life away from cities, in fact like nothing more than lying naked next to some wasps' nest in a damp meadow, or staggering toward remote country cottages under the weight of a huge backpack.

Czech girls also break the unwritten but accepted code of West European civilization, which is that in exchange for the woman — after coming home from work — cooking, cleaning and running the house (doing the tax return, too, is now part of "household chores"), the man will undertake the heavy and/or technical work. This consists solely of the challenging labor of changing light bulbs. But rather than enjoying the romantic fright of enforced darkness, a Czech girl will be up on her portable ladder and have that bulb changed before one can utter "Thomas Edison."

I call this humiliating the master of the house, but the blame is on the old regime, which strove to break down such bourgeois values ... except that, for some inexplicable reason, in the age of the subversive Beatles, there was a law that required women to wear bras. At Czech TV headquarters there were even bra inspectors at the main entrance whose job it was to peep down every blouse to ensure compliance.

Only a few years ago, Prague was crowded with the most attractive women on God's Earth. Sitting in the Louvre with an American colleague once, it was he who said: "Look around us. There are seven or eight real 10s — just in this room alone." He was right. But that was before the Czech Republic joined the European Union.

The last absolute heart-stopper I saw was 18 months ago at a tram stop in a grimy area of Prague 10. She was divine. The stop was crowded with men. Were they, like me, quite prepared to follow her onto any tram, anywhere, anytime? She had a face that could launch a thousand e-mails.

The papers have been full of Miss World's state visits back home. Now she's getting a bit of a disappointment. Her expression, even at her tender age of 18, is turning serious — as if feeling the gravitas of her impending imperial role. Maybe beauty is partly vacuity? I should have thought that the contest's male viewers care less about the brains than they do about beauty, and the more of the beauty they feast their eyes on the better. And women? Surely, they must detest beauty and brains. For the plainer ones, that must represent a real threat. They were buoyed up by the hope that if you're that beautiful, then you must at least be dumb.

The secret weapon of all Czechs is rumor. It's sad that poor Kuchařová is not as blonde as she seems (a clear case of the pot calling the kettle brunette, as most Czech girls, while thoroughly bleaching their Slavic hair, always forget the eyebrows — hence, perhaps, their very expressive eyes), that she's had plastic surgery, that one leg is longer than the other. Where's straightforward national pride in her achievement?

There's the old Czech joke of some god granting a variety of nationalities one wish. The others wish for fame or wealth or fabulous houses. The Czechs' turn comes: "My neighbor's goat." "Ah, you want his goat?" the god asks, eager to start dishing out the goodies. "Oh no," the Czech replies. "I just want it dead!" Kuchařová, according to her PR, has cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, a bird and a turtle. Plenty of wishing material for those less blessed with her good fortune sitting round their cauldrons this autumn.

But Czech girls who are 10s have now flown to more lucrative hunting grounds in London, New York City, Rome and Paris. Luckily — as the lecherous doorman of the appropriately named Labor and Social Affairs Ministry said to me once — there's a new crop every year. They grow here!

-The author is a writer and conservationist and can be reached at stephen.c@stles.org