My story, unlike most, begins in a dark place in a dark time. Though one of self-triumph and gallantry, my tale isn’t a happy one. I was born Charles Jacques Margeaux on a sticky spring evening, the twenty-sixth of April, seventeen seventy-two, to a humble grain farmer and his lady. I was a pudgy baby, one with fat, rosy cheeks and big, bulging eyes, glazed a blue crystal hue that glowed like my mothers. I had a head of thick, floppy hair that twisted in tight coils and drooped in my face, a sooty black color, like my father’s.
      My family was a poor one, a frazzled clan of centuries’ worth of farmers. Mon famille resided in a small wooden shack tucked in between the rolling hills of Belle Colline, fixed just outside the buzzing city of Paris. The Margeaux’s quarters weren’t alluring. Our residence resembled a shed, a bare wooden frame with thin timber sides filled with hay. Two foggy windows were unevenly fixated into the walls, and an ever-burning fire place resided in the back left corner of the shack. A thick, heavy, wooden door hung crookedly on its frame, the cool night air frequently seeping through it’s exposed gaps. A small crucifix woven from a thicket of branches hung above the door, but was often taken down and shoved under mama and papa’s bed whenever we had visitors. Mama always told me being a Catholic wasn’t something to flaunt, and I never once questioned it.
      Growing up, I wasn’t much of a chirpy character. My clothes were too small and my toys were bland, our house was boring and all I ever smelt was burnt bread and manure. My parents said they were happy with the way we lived, but the older I got the more I noticed the dull bags unders mama’s eyes and the bubblegum pink rawness of papa’s hands and feet when he got home from the farm. I saw the face-palming and the eye-rubbing and the knee-bouncing that hexed my parents whenever the tax collector arrived at our door. I could feel the holes in our socks and the ripped toes of our shoes and I could see the thin of our clothes barely slouching off our beetled bones because we didn’t have enough to eat.

      Graphic visions flickered in my thoughts and disarrayed my sanity; scenes of screaming and yelling and sacrifices and blood. They haunted my sleep and blighted my peace and obsessed my mind to the point where I couldn’t render my commission aiding mon père on the farm. It was incontrovertible that messages were of considerable significance, and that something magnificent was to become of the Third Estate. And so I decided to write about them.

                 The Pyres of a Revolution (Archard Delacroix)
                                Together they march
                                Linked by titanic fury
                                  Transition awaits

      I reminisce the first time I saw an Archard Delacroix original. It was a chilly February morning, I was fifteen or so, and I’d been in town to pick up few farming goods for my father, and I’d snatched a copy of the local paper from the Square. My eyes scanned the inky sentences until they focused themselves on a smaller column printed in the lower right corner of the issue.  As soon as the first few words processed in my mind my heart beat sped quick and my palms started to sweat. I felt dizzy and excited and happy and anxious all at one time and in one utter, unequivocal facet.
      I remember tucking the article into the front pocket of my heavy coat, and gripping the burlap sack of small farming equipment I’d bought for my father in a tight, sweaty fist. I ran home, my chest puffing in short, quick breaths and my feet bitter and freezing by the time I arrived. I clapped the heels of my boots, knocking the snow and mud off of the bottoms in small icy clumps.

      I entered the small home, a lukewarm breeze immediately brushing against my skin. My father sat inside, his grayed hair pulled back under a leather cap, his lanky legs resting on the dinner table. In his hand he held a copy of the tabloid, a distraught expression illustrating his features. “Who does this Delacroix man think he is?” He shook his head, muttering inaudible blather to himself.

“He’ll get us all killed.”

      Then he sighed and wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, and stood up. “Don’t read this garbage,” He told me, wagging a skeletal finger at me. “It’s cheap and rash and proves how greedy people are.” I nodded in agreement, but I didn’t agree. Then he went on about something to do with farming and I zoned out because I couldn’t believe he wasn’t willing to fight for his rights and the rights of his family now and to come - because he was afraid. I can’t say it didn’t boggle me, but I didn’t argue. He threw the paper in the furnace, a thread of black smoke curling into a spiral ascension after it.
      But the poems didn’t stop there. A Delacroix haiku made its way into the Belle Colline tribune every week, each time discovering a new spot on the front page to nestle in and catch the reader’s attention. The following few months were a bit harsher than usual. Taxes on everyday goods hexed the greater population of Belle Colline, and riots started to erupt all across town. Papa started locking the doors and windows at night, and we’d pin thin, patterned cloth over the translucent parts. Again and again, in a dizzy pattern of destruction, orbs of orange and red haze fluttered past these parts, and mama would whimper and papa would tuck her under his arm and kiss her forehead. Often times a smoldering torch was abandoned, and more than often a smoldering torch was abandoned and left to have it’s torrid curls slither themselves onto a bale of hay or even the wooden base of someone’s home.
      The farm was failing. Every morning a thin layer of dewy film covered scorch marks and muddy footprints that trailed through Papa’s harvest. He cursed the people. He cursed them for being greedy and ungrateful. He hated Archard Delacroix most of all. He said it was his fault that a revolution was established. I, on the other hand, knew that that wasn’t the exact case. For I cursed the government, and their taxes and their laws, and the two estates who knew they had everything and more. Delacroix was a good man, I thought, with good intentions. He fueled the people the courage and determination they needed to fabricate a basic establishment of human rights. ‘That’s what I want,’ I’d then thought to myself. ‘That’s exactly what I want.’.
      I remember very clearly what happened next. It was a muggy summer evening, the fourteenth of July, seventeen eighty-nine. I was sixteen then. The sun had just begin to set, and a velvety purple hue speckled the sky. The town had been silent for a week and some days now, quiet, planning. Delacroix was silent too.

      We had just finished supper, and Papa was gazing out the window while Mama was washing the dishes. There was a loud rapping noise, sounding from the front door.

“Francois, Francois!” A frightened voice called out to my father.

      Papa looked at Mama, and Mama took me by the shoulders and pulled me into a corner out of view of the door. I heard the clicking of undone locks, and an eerie creak accompanied the revelation of a bearded man in our doorway.

      “Francois, they’ve stormed the Bastille!” My father ran a tremulous hand through his hair. He sighed, and looked at my mother with a pale face and big eyes, swimming with anguish. My mother kissed the top of my head, and joined my father in the doorway. He pinched her under his arm, and she held her hand at his stomach. My heart swelled with joy, and a rosy blush painted my cheeks. ‘I did it,’ I thought to myself. ‘I actually started a revolution!’

      “This is it,” Papa whispered to himself. “This is it.” And this was it, the beginning of the revolution, that is, for I am Archard Delacroix, and this is the beginning of a new free era.