Stay there he did, and the palace saw a more brilliant court than ever it had sheltered under royalty. Josephine was a woman of taste and tact, and the building which Marie Antoinette found bare even of necessary furnishings at the end of her enforced journey from Versailles, the wife of the First Consul arrayed in elegance and used as a social-political battle field in which she was as competent as was her husband in the open. “I win battles,” Napoleon said, “but Josephine wins hearts.” Dress became elegant once more and not only women but men were as richly attired as if the Revolution with its plain democratic apparel had not intervened. Once more men wore knee breeches and silk stockings, and it was only the aristocrats whose property had been confiscated who advertised their poverty by wearing trousers, “citizen fashion.” “Citizen,” as a title, fell into disuse, and once again “Monsieur” and “Madame” were used as terms of address. At first the consuls were addressed as “Citoyen premier consul,” “Citoyen second consul,” and “Citoyen troisième consul.” The clumsiness of these titles induced M. de Talleyrand to propose as abbreviations “_Hic, Haec, Hoc_.” “These would perfectly fit the three consuls,” he added; “_Hic_ for the masculine, Bonaparte; _haec_ for the feminine, Cambacérès, who was a lady’s man, and _hoc_, the neutral Lebrun, who was a figurehead.” Napoleon’s acquaintance with other capitals spurred him to emulate their beauties and his knowledge of engineering helped him to bring them into being in his own. He opened no fewer than sixty new streets, often combining in the result civic elegance with the better sanitation whose desirability he had learned from his care of the health of his armies. He swept away masses of old houses on the Cité, he tore down the noisome prisons of the Châtelet and the tower of the Temple and laid out squares on their sites, he built sidewalks, condemned sewage to sewers instead of allowing it to flow in streams down the center of the streets, introduced gas for lighting, and completed the numbering of houses, an undertaking which had been hanging on for seventy-five years.