Carlota had been planning to issue dinner invitations widely on the second night of the convention, grab all the useful people from among the minor nobles who are here as elected delegates, but by the end of the day she's thoroughly exasperated and thinking she can reschedule that for the third day of the convention once it's clear what Cansellarion wants. There's still a lot of work to do on making abolition go as cleanly as possible and it's beneath her to be annoyed that she has to be the one to do it when there's nothing at all in it for her, but she is annoyed about it. 

 

Republicanism is very stupid. It means that anything important like slavery has to be handled with all the subtlety of a newly third circle evoker, and that conversations that should rightly happen in the Queen's presence among her respected advisors happen in a crowd that'll randomly contribute views like "we should conquer Taldor". It means that teenage girls who belong in a cloistered religious education program are threatening archdukes. Judging by her notes nearly all the committees are insane, but it's a very diligent kind of insanity where they're getting a lot of work done on their lunatic priorities. Her secretary who took notes on the family committee told her with a straight face that they were considering banning men from divorce. Who would enforce that? How? Not the concern of anyone on the family committee! The education committee is predictably made up of that set of strange bedfellows who think the state should pay to tutor all children, never mind with what money. 

"Really," she muses to the secretary, "I should get an enormous banner made and draped across the walls of each committee room that reads 'with what money?'"

         "Should I commission such, your grace?"

"No. What you should do is go out and get today's pamphlets." 

         "They should have been delivered here, your grace."

"No one would have delivered here any which violate the latest directive of the Queen, but I want to know if there are any of those circulating after today's events. That little place next to the seamstresses' might have some."

         The secretary bobs her head a bit anxiously.

What - oh. It's that she's technically just asked her to go get pamphlets that aren't legal to be circulating, and the woman's trying to decide who she's more frightened of, and despite lots of tutoring on the point won't just ask. "You don't have to buy them. If they're being sold that's of interest." There's no chance at all that she can get into the legal code 'people can break minor laws clearly intended for the rabble on the orders of a duchess, with the duchess accountable if this causes any problems', even though that is absolutely how the law both does work and ought to work. "Dismissed." Time to write a dozen letters laying out the abolition situation to people who will want to hear it from her and can make it go less disastrously. Her dinner guests will be here before she's halfway through them.