The place of the meeting alone would have sufficed to provoke Mme. Adam’s hostility to the Congress. For France, at the conqueror’s bidding, to go to his capital there to discuss, without mentioning her own wrong, the affairs of Europe on the basis of the _status quo_, seemed to _la grande Française_ nothing but a new humiliation. And this view finds justification in Professor Oncken’s contribution to the _Cambridge Modern History_.[361] Here, in accents of pride, the German Professor describes the Congress, which brought statesmen from every European country to the capital of the new empire, as a magnificent acknowledgment of the position of Germany, and one of Bismarck’s greatest achievements. One cannot help sympathising with Mme. Adam’s patriotism when she protests against a French contribution to this new crown of glory for the German Empire. While Gambetta argued that France, by standing out of the Congress, would lose in prestige, Mme. Adam maintained that she would gain by standing aloof as a Power which it was necessary to win over. Moreover, she told Gambetta that her friend, Cialdini, the Italian Ambassador in Paris, had assured her that if France should refuse to be represented at the Congress Italy would follow her example. Such having been Mme. Adam’s attitude towards the Congress from the beginning, she naturally inclined to find fault with all the decisions and arrangements made at Berlin. She was in Rome when the Congress closed on the 13th of July. “_Jour néfaste_,” she writes, “_s’il en fût jamais. Le Congrès de Berlin se termine. L’encouragement aux troubles, aux ambitions futures est signé._”[362] And now that well-nigh forty years have passed she still regards ce jour néfaste as a black-letter day. “_Le Congrès de Berlin_,” she wrote only last year, “_ma bête noire, l’un des deux motifs pour lesquels je me suis brouillée politiquement avec mes meilleurs amis_.”[363] As Russia’s faithful friend[364] and the ardent advocate of a Franco-Russian alliance, Mme. Adam strongly resented Russia’s treatment at Berlin. She suspected that one of Bismarck’s ideas in summoning the Congress had been to rob Russia of the fruits of her victories in the Russo-Turkish War. She saw that as a result of the Congress Russia had become as isolated in the East as was France in the West. That Russians were themselves of this opinion was proved, when on leaving Berlin the Russian Chancellor Gortchakoff declared “the Congress to have been the darkest page in his career.”