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10 Introduction

extremely ornate, conventional dedication to Luigi d'Este, Cardinal of Fer-rara, is followed by a second dedication and two sonnets intended to ad-vertise a triumph of her early career: her encounter with Henri III, about to become the king of France, when he visited Yenice in 1574. Among spectacular civic festivities that lasted ten days, Henri spent a night secretly in her house. In her letter and her two sonnets to Henri, she makes the se-cret public. In spite of the contrast she sets up between his high status and her lowly one, to record his visit as these texts do was, in fact, to elevate her-self in the eyes of her fellow citizens.

In morę or less subtle ways, all of Franco s Letters contribute to an im-pression not only of charm and social ease but of literary cultivation and wisdom. In Letter 13, in which she invites the recipient to dine with her and another man, she calls attention to her familiarity with classical epis-tles. To describe the relaxed, unpretentious occasion she has in mind, she quotes from a letter of Cicero but revises the citation to suit her purpose. In his first letter to Atticus, Cicero had written that his political competi-tor P. Galba had been refused the position he sought “sine fuco ac fallaciis morę maiorum” (without falsity or deceit, in the fashion of our ances-tors).¹⁷ Franco retains most of this Latin phrase but applies it, instead, to the informal get-together she is offering to her two men friends: “We can partake, sine fuco et caerimoniis morę maiorum [without falsity or pomp, in the fashion of our ancestors], of whatever food there will be.”

This witty revision of a classical citation stands at the lighter end of the spectrum of Franco s uses of the familiar letter. In others, she adopts the position of serious morał advisor to fellow Venetians. In Letter 4, for ex-ample, reminding an unnamed małe correspondent that he has given her wise advice on how to face adversity, she tells him that she is going to give that advice back to him. The friendly yet serious counsel here, typical of the familiar letter, is crucial to Francos feminist position because it allows her to use her exemplary behavior as a letter-writer to undercut the stereotype of the greedy, immoral prostitute. In the third paragraph of the letter, she seems to accept the second-class status of women when she reminds her in-terlocutor, who is lamenting his misfortune, of his privileged social position. God, she points out, “though capable of making you born from the filthiest and lowest species of all the beasts, . . . gave you birth in the most perfect, the human species, and of that species he gave you the małe sex, and not, as to me, the female one.” But if this sounds like an acknowledg-ment of małe superiority, Francos insistence on the absolute reciprocity between the mans advice to her and hers to him establishes a parity between them that contradicts any assumption of mens greater wisdom or 17. Cicero, Letters to Atticus, 1.1, trans. E. D. Winsredr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 2-3.