@dive123 This manga portrays a society that's an amalgamation of German, English and French societies in late 18th and 19th century, with a bit post WWII mixed in. Yeah, there are some inaccuracies here and there, but this is a work of fiction not a documentary, this artistic liberty doesn't take away from the quality of writing at all.
The German part is clearly overall style/naming of characters. Randolf is a pretty good (one might say textbook) example of a Prussian officer. The English/French part is the whole nobility thing. The titles are English but behaviour and deference to the sovereign is French (in England peers had many more rights than in France for example, magna carta and such). What clearly is post WWII is the standing of women on the social ladder. Yes in the Regency and Victorian Era, there were powerful women, but they were not the norm, here they are much more numerous -- which isn't bad, mind you. It rarely makes for a good story to leave out half of your population (and readers).
In any human time up until the end of WWI and WWII (depending how you look at it) social standing defined what you wore, it defined where you went to school and how long, it defined your friends; it very much defined who you were. A noble in that time would never ever see themselves on the same level as citizens, let alone commoners. This separation of two social classes, where one had much more than the other is one of the reason for the French revolution and why bicameral parliaments exist (you had to give the commoners some rights, but god be damned if they sit in the same room as you!)
Example: Germany is usually called "land of thinkers and poets", but people forget people like Goethe and Schiller, had rock solid education beofer anything else -- Goethe was a lawyer and his father financed his studies with more money than he'd ever need (think of studying at Havard and your father pays the 50k tuition fee
and gives you 50k on top of it). Schiller had a PhD in medicine and again his studies were financed by his father. If you didn't have any money you'd finish eight years board school and then work on the field or in a factory living from hand to mouth.
In Germany and France there also existed a concept of civil death/mort civile, where you'd loose your "civil honour rights" by court ruling, meaning your marriage would automatically be annulled, all your property would be confiscated among other things. You were seen as "dead", even though you were very much alive.
So what could Connie have done?
Not much, really. She wasn't in the position of declining the invitation. She also couldn't refuse the signing of the contract, because that would amount to declining the invitation. And she couldn't have spoken up after the meeting, since a) the contract b) nobody would believe the daughter of a (just recently almost bankrupt) viscount over a countess (I'm assuming Deborah is s countess in her own right, not just the daughter or wife of one), especially with no proof and the word of two other countess' against her.
The only thing she could've done beforehand is to ask Randolf for help and
he could've made and excuse for her not going, but that only works so many times. Loose-Loose indeed. It also would've robbed us of a crucial plot point in Connie's character development. As seen in page 78, she starts to see the count not as a partner in a faked marriage anymore, but as a person she starts to love honestly.
Yes the scene could've benefited from a bit more foreshadowing (we basically only got that one interaction between Connie and her fiancée, which hinted at
something), but the rest of the chapter was top notch and a solid 9/10