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Jean Christophe: In Paris by Romain Rolland

R >> Romain Rolland >> Jean Christophe: In Paris




Christophe wandered from group to group, but could identify himself with
none of them. The men talked savagely of hunting, brutally of love, and
only of money with any sort of real appreciation. And that was cold and
cunning. They talked business in the smoking-room. Christophe heard some
one say of a certain fop who was sauntering from one lady to another, with
a buttonhole in his coat, oozing heavy compliments:

"So! He is free again?"

In a corner of the room two ladies were talking of the love-affairs of a
young actress and a society woman. There was occasional music. Christophe
was asked to play. Large women, breathless and heavily perspiring,
declaimed in an apocalyptic tone verses of Sully-Prudhomme or Auguste
Dorchain. A famous actor solemnly recited a _Mystic Ballad_ to the
accompaniment of an American organ. Words and music were so stupid that
they turned Christophe sick. But the Roman women were delighted, and
laughed heartily to show their magnificent teeth. Scenes from Ibsen were
performed. It was a fine epilogue to the struggle of a great man against
the Pillars of Society that it should be used for their diversion!

And then they all began, of course, to prattle about art. That was
horrible. The women especially began to talk of Ibsen, Wagner, Tolstoy,
flirtatiously, politely, boredly, or idiotically. Once the conversation had
started, there was no stopping it. The disease was contagious. Christophe
had to listen to the ideas of bankers, brokers, and slave-dealers on art.
In vain did he refuse to speak or try to turn the conversation: they
insisted on talking about music and poetry. As Berlioz said: "Such people
use the words quite coolly: just as though they were talking of wine,
women, or some such trash." An alienist physician recognized one of his
patients in an Ibsen heroine, though to his way of thinking she was
infinitely more silly. An engineer quite sincerely declared that the
husband was the sympathetic character in the _Doll's House_. The famous
actor--a well-known Comedian--brayed his profound ideas on Nietzsche
and Carlyle: he assured Christophe that he could not see a picture of
Velasquez--(the idol of the hour)--"without the tears coursing down his
cheeks." And he confided--still to Christophe's private ear--that, though
he esteemed art very highly, yet he esteemed still more highly the art of
living, acting, and that if he were asked to choose what part he would
play, it would be that of Bismarck.... Sometimes there would be of the
company a professed wit, but the level of the conversation was not
appreciably higher for that. Generally they said nothing; they confined
themselves to a jerky remark or an enigmatic smile: they lived on their
reputations, and were saved further trouble. But there were a few
professional talkers, generally from the South. They talked about anything
and everything. They had no sense of proportion: everything came alike
to them. One was a Shakespeare. Another a Moliere. Another a Pascal, if
not a Jesus Christ. They compared Ibsen with Dumas _fils_, Tolstoy with
George Sand: and the gist of it all was that everything came from France.
Generally they were ignorant of foreign languages. But that did not disturb
them. It mattered so little to their audience whether they told the truth
or not! What did matter was that they should say amusing things, things as
flattering as possible to national vanity. Foreigners had to put up with
a good deal--with the exception of the idol of the hour: for there was
always a fashionable idol: Grieg, or Wagner, or Nietzsche, or Gorki, or
D'Annunzio. It never lasted long, and the idol was certain one fine morning
to be thrown on to the rubbish-heap.

For the moment the idol was Beethoven. Beethoven--save the mark!--was in
the fashion: at least, among literary and polite persons: for musicians had
dropped him at once, in accordance with the see-saw system which is one of
the laws of artistic taste in France. A Frenchman needs to know what his
neighbor thinks before he knows what he thinks himself, so that he can
think the same thing or the opposite. Thus, when they saw Beethoven in
popular favor, the most distinguished musicians began to discover that he
was not distinguished enough for them: they claimed to lead opinion, not to
follow it: and rather than be in agreement with it they turned their backs
on it. They began to regard Beethoven as a man afflicted with deafness,
crying in a voice of bitterness: and some of them declared that he might be
an excellent moralist, but that he was certainly overpraised as a musician.
That sort of joke was not at all to Christophe's taste. Still less did he
like the enthusiasm of polite society. If Beethoven had come to Paris just
then, he would have been the lion of the hour: it was such a pity that he
had been dead for more than a century. His vogue grew not so much out of
his music as out of the more or less romantic circumstances of his life
which had been popularized by sentimental and virtuous biographies. His
rugged face and lion's mane had become a romantic figure. Ladies wept
for him: they hinted that if they had known him he should not have been
so unhappy: and in their greatness of heart they were the more ready to
sacrifice all for him, in that there was no danger of Beethoven taking them
at their word: the old fellow was beyond all need of anything. That was why
the virtuosi, the conductors, and the _impresarii_ bowed down in pious
worship before him: and, as the representatives of Beethoven, they gathered
the homage destined for him. There were sumptuous festivals at exorbitant
prices, which afforded society people an opportunity of showing their
generosity--and incidentally also of discovering Beethoven's symphonies.
There were committees of actors, men of the world, Bohemians, and
politicians, appointed by the Republic to preside over the destinies of
art, and they informed the world of their intention to erect a monument to
Beethoven: and on these committees, together with a few honest men whose
names guaranteed the rest, were all the riffraff who would have stoned
Beethoven if he had been alive, if Beethoven had not crushed the life out
of them. Christophe watched and listened. He ground his teeth to keep
himself from saying anything outrageous. He was on tenterhooks the whole
evening. He could not talk, nor could he keep silent. It seemed to him
humiliating and shameful to talk neither for pleasure nor from necessity,
but out of politeness, because he had to talk. He was not allowed to say
what he thought, and it was impossible for him to make conversation. And
he did not even know how to be polite without talking. If he looked at
anybody, he glared too fixedly and intently: in spite of himself he studied
that person, and that person was offended. If he spoke at all, he believed
too much in what he was saying; and that was disturbing for everybody, and
even for himself. He quite admitted that he was out of his element: and, as
he was clever enough to sound the general note of the company, in which his
presence was a discord, he was as upset by his manners as his hosts. He was
angry with himself and with them.

When, at last he stood in the street once more, very late at night, he was
so worn out with the boredom of it all that he could hardly drag himself
home: he wanted to lie down just where he was, in the street, as he had
done many times when he was returning as a boy from his performances at the
Palace of the Grand Duke. Although he had only five or six francs to take
him to the end of the week, he spent two of them on a cab. He flung himself
into it the more quickly to escape: and as he drove along he groaned aloud
from sheer exhaustion. When he reached home and got to bed, he groaned in
his sleep.... And then, suddenly, he roared with laughter as he remembered
some ridiculous saying. He woke up repeating it, and imitating the features
of the speaker. Next day, and for several days after, as he walked about,
he would suddenly bellow like a bull.... Why did he visit these people?
Why did he go on visiting them? Why force himself to gesticulate and make
faces, like the rest, and pretend to be interested in things that did not
appeal to him in the very least? Was it true that he was not in the least
interested? A year ago he would not have been able to put up with them for
a moment. Now, at heart, he was amused by it all, while at the same time it
exasperated him. Was a little of the indifference of the Parisians creeping
over him? He would sometimes wonder fearfully whether he had lost strength.
But, in truth, he had gained in strength. He was more free in mind in
strange surroundings. In spite of himself, his eyes were opened to the
great Comedy of the world.

Besides, whether he liked it or not, he had to go on with it if he wanted
his art to be recognized by Parisian society, which is only interested in
art in so far as it knows the artist. And he had to make himself known if
he were to find among these Philistines the pupils necessary to keep him
alive.

And, then, Christophe had a heart: his heart must have affection: wherever
he might be, there he would find food for his affections: without it he
could not live.

* * * * *

Among the few girls of that class of society--few enough--whom Christophe
taught, was the daughter of a rich motor-car manufacturer, Colette
Stevens. Her father was a Belgian, a naturalized Frenchman, the son
of an Anglo-American settled at Antwerp, and a Dutchwoman. Her mother
was an Italian. A regular Parisian family. To Christophe--and to many
others--Colette Stevens was the type of French girl.

She was eighteen, and had velvety, soft black eyes, which she used
skilfully upon young men--regular Spanish eyes, with enormous pupils; a
rather long and fantastic nose, which wrinkled up and moved at the tip as
she talked, with little fractious pouts and shrugs; rebellious hair; a
pretty little face, rather sallow complexion, dabbed with powder; heavy,
rather thick features: altogether she was like a plump kitten.

She was slight, very well dressed, attractive, provoking: she had sly,
affected, rather silly manners: her pose was that of a little girl, and she
would sit rocking her chair for hours at a time, and giving little
exclamations like: "No? Impossible...."

At meals she would clap her hands when there was a dish she loved: in the
drawing-room she would smoke cigarette after cigarette, and, when there
were men present, display an exuberant affection for her girl-friends,
flinging her arms round their necks, kissing their hands, whispering
in their ears, making ingenuous and naughty remarks, doing it most
brilliantly, in a soft, twittering voice; and in the lightest possible way
she would say improper things, without seeming to do more than hint at
them, and was even more skilful in provoking them from others; she had the
ingenuous air of a little girl, who knows perfectly well what she is about,
with her large brilliant eyes, slyly and voluptuously looking sidelong,
maliciously taking in all the gossip, and catching at all the dubious
remarks of the conversation, and all the time angling for hearts.

All these tricks and shows, and her sophisticated ingenuity, were not at
all to Christophe's liking. He had better things to do than to lend himself
to the practices of an artful little girl, and did not even care to look
on at them for his amusement. He had to earn his living, to keep his life
and ideas from death. He had no interest in these drawing-room parakeets
beyond the gaining of a livelihood. In return for their money, he gave them
lessons, conscientiously concentrating all his energies on the task, to
keep the boredom of it from mastering him, and his attention from being
distracted by the tricks of his pupils when they were coquettes, like
Colette Stevens. He paid no more attention to her than to Colette's little
cousin, a child of twelve, shy and silent, whom the Stevens had adopted, to
whom also Christophe gave lessons on the piano.

But Colette was too clever not to feel that all her charms were lost on
Christophe, and too adroit not to adapt herself at once to his character.
She did not even need to do so deliberately. It was a natural instinct with
her. She was a woman. She was like water, formless. The soul of every man
she met was a vessel, whose form she took immediately out of curiosity. It
was a law of her existence that she should always be some one else. Her
whole personality was for ever shifting. She was for ever changing her
vessel.

Christophe attracted her for many reasons, the chief of which was that he
was not attracted by her. He attracted her also because he was different
from all the young men of her acquaintance: she had never tried to pour
herself into a vessel of such a rugged form. And, finally, he attracted
her, because, being naturally and by inheritance expert in the valuation at
the first glance of men and vessels, she knew perfectly well that what he
lacked in polish Christophe made up in a solidity of character which none
of her smart young Parisians could offer her.

She played as well and as badly as most idle young women. She played a
great deal and very little--that is to say, that she was always working at
it, but knew nothing at all about it. She strummed on her piano all day
long, for want of anything else to do, or from affectation, or because it
gave her pleasure. Sometimes she rattled along mechanically. Sometimes she
would play well, very well, with taste and soul--(it was almost as though
she had a soul: but, as a matter of fact, she only borrowed one). Before
she knew Christophe, she was capable of liking Massenet, Grieg, Thome. But
after she met Christophe she ceased to like them. Then she played Bach and
Beethoven very correctly--(which is not very high praise): but the great
thing was that she loved them. At bottom it was not Beethoven, nor Thome,
nor Bach, nor Grieg that she loved, but the notes, the sounds, the fingers
running over the keys, the thrills she got from the chords which tickled
her nerves and made her wriggle with pleasure.

In the drawing-room of the great house, decorated with faded tapestry, and
on an easel in the middle room, a portrait of the stout Madame Stevens by
a fashionable painter who had represented her in a languishing attitude,
like a flower dying for want of water, with a die-away expression in her
eyes, and her body draped in impossible curves, by way of expressing the
rare quality of her millionaire soul--in the great drawing-room, with
its bow-windows looking on to a clump of old trees powdered with snow,
Christophe would find Colette sitting at her piano, repeating the
same passage over and over again, delighting her ear with mellifluous
dissonance.

"Ah!" Christophe would say as he entered, "the cat is still purring!"

"How wicked of you!" she would laugh.... (And she would hold out her soft
little hand.)

"... Listen. Isn't it pretty?"

"Very pretty," he would say indifferently.

"You aren't listening!... Will you please listen?"

"I am listening.... It's the same thing over and over again."

"Ah! you are no musician," she would say pettishly.

"As if that were music or anything like it!"

"What! Not music!... What is it, then, if you please?"

"You know quite well: I won't tell you, because it would not be polite."

"All the more reason why you should say it."

"You want me to?... So much the worse for you!... Well, do you know what
you are doing with your piano?... You are flirting with it."

"Indeed!"

"Certainly. You say to it: 'Dear piano, dear piano, say pretty things to
me; kiss me; give me just one little kiss!'"

"You need not say any more," said Colette, half vexed, half laughing. "You
haven't the least idea of respect."

"Not the least."

"You are impertinent.... And then, even if it were so, isn't that the right
way to love music?"

"Oh, come, don't mix music up with that."

"But that is music! A beautiful chord is a kiss."

"I never told you that."

"But isn't it true?... Why do you shrug your shoulders and make faces?"

"Because it annoys me."

"So much the better."

"It annoys me to hear music spoken of as though it were a sort of
indulgence.... Oh, it isn't your fault. It's the fault of the world you
live in. The stale society in which you live regards music as a sort of
legitimate vice.... Come, sit down! Play me your sonata."

"No. Let us talk a little longer."

"I'm not here to talk. I'm here to teach you the piano.... Come, play
away!"

"You're so rude!" said Colette, rather vexed--but at heart delighted to be
handled so roughly.

She played her piece carefully: and, as she was clever, she succeeded
fairly well, and sometimes even very well. Christophe, who was not
deceived, laughed inwardly at the skill "of the little beast, who played
as though she felt what she was playing, while really she felt nothing
at all." And yet he had a sort of amused sympathy for her. Colette, on
her part, seized every excuse for going on with the conversation, which
interested her much more than her lesson. It was no good Christophe drawing
back on the excuse that he could not say what he thought without hurting
her feelings: she always wheedled it out of him: and the more insulting it
was, the less she was hurt by it: it was an amusement for her. But, as she
was quick enough to see that Christophe liked nothing so much as sincerity,
she would contradict him flatly, and argue tenaciously They would part very
good friends.

However, Christophe would never have had the least illusion about their
friendship, and there would never have been the smallest intimacy between
them, had not Colette one day taken it into her head, out of sheer
instinctive coquetry, to confide in him.

The evening before her parents had given an At Home. She had laughed,
chattered, flirted outrageously: but next morning, when Christophe came for
her lesson, she was worn out, drawn-looking, gray-faced, and haggard. She
hardly spoke: she seemed utterly depressed. She sat at the piano, played
softly, made mistakes, tried to correct them, made them again, stopped
short, and said:

"I can't.... Please forgive me.... Please wait a little...."

He asked if she were unwell. She said: "No.... She was out of sorts.... She
had bouts of it.... It was absurd, but he must not mind."

He proposed to go away and come again another day: but she insisted on his
staying:

"Just a moment.... I shall be all right presently.... It's silly of me,
isn't it?"

He felt that she was not her usual self: but he did not question her: and,
to turn the conversation, he said:

"That's what comes of having been so brilliant last night. You took too
much out of yourself."

She smiled a little ironically.

"One can't say the same of you," she replied.

He laughed.

"I don't believe you said a word," she went on.

"Not a word."

"But there were interesting people there."

"Oh yes. All sorts of lights and famous people, all talking at once. But
I'm lost among all your boneless Frenchmen who understand everything, and
explain everything, and excuse everything--and feel nothing at all. People
who talk for hours together about art and love! Isn't it revolting?"

"But you ought to be interested in art if not in love."

"One doesn't talk about these things: one does them."

"But when one cannot do them?" said Colette, pouting.

Christophe replied with a laugh:

"Well, leave it to others. Everybody is not fit for art."

"Nor for love?"

"Nor for love."

"How awful! What is left for us?"

"Housekeeping."

"Thanks," said Colette, rather annoyed. She turned to the piano and began
again, made mistakes, thumped the keyboard, and moaned:

"I can't!... I'm no good at all. I believe you are right. Women aren't any
good."

"It's something to be able to say so," said Christophe genially.

She looked at him rather sheepishly, like a little girl who has been
scolded, and said:

"Don't be so hard."

"I'm not saying anything hard about good women," replied Christophe gaily.
"A good woman is Paradise on earth. Only, Paradise on earth...."

"I know. No one has ever seen it."

"I'm not so pessimistic. I say only that I have never seen it: but that's
no reason why it should not exist. I'm determined to find it, if it does
exist. But it is not easy. A good woman and a man of genius are equally
rare."

"And all the other men and women don't count?"

"On the contrary, it is only they who count--for the world."

"But for you?"

"For me, they don't exist."

"You _are_ hard," repeated Colette.

"A little. Somebody has to be hard, if only in the interest of the
others!... If there weren't a few pebbles here and there in the world, the
whole thing would go to pulp."

"Yes. You are right. It is a good thing for you that you are strong," said
Colette sadly. "But you must not be too hard on men,--and especially on
women who aren't strong.... You don't know how terrible our weakness is to
us. Because you see us flirting, and laughing, and doing silly things, you
think we never dream of anything else, and you despise us. Ah! if you could
see all that goes on in the minds of the girls of from fifteen to eighteen
as they go out into society, and have the sort of success that comes
to their youth and freshness--when they have danced, and talked smart
nonsense, and said bitter things at which people laugh because they laugh,
when they have given themselves to imbeciles, and sought in vain in their
eyes the light that is nowhere to be found,--if you could see them in their
rooms at night, in silence, alone, kneeling in agony to pray!..."

"Is it possible?" said Christophe, altogether amazed. "What! you, too, have
suffered?"

Colette did not reply: but tears came to her eyes. She tried to smile and
held out her hand to Christophe: he grasped it warmly.

"What would you have us do? There is nothing to do. You men can free
yourselves and do what you like. But we are bound for ever and ever within
the narrow circle of the duties and pleasures of society: we cannot break
free."

"There is nothing to prevent your freeing yourselves, finding some work you
like, and winning your independence just as we do."

"As you do? Poor Monsieur Krafft! Your work is not so very certain!... But
at least you like your work. But what sort of work can we do? There isn't
any that we could find interesting--for, I know, we dabble in all sorts
of things, and pretend to be interested in a heap of things that do not
concern us: we do so want to be interested in something! I do what the
others do. I do charitable work and sit on social work committees. I go
to lectures at the Sorbonne by Bergson and Jules Lemaitre, historical
concerts, classical matinees, and I take notes and notes.... I never know
what I am writing!... and I try to persuade myself that I am absorbed by
it, or at least that it is useful. Ah! but I know that it is not true.
I know that I don't care a bit, and that I am bored by it all!... Don't
despise me because I tell you frankly what everybody thinks in secret I'm
no sillier than the rest. But what use are philosophy, history, and science
to me? As for art,--you see,--I strum and daub and make messy little
water-color sketches;--but is that enough to fill a woman's life? There is
only one end to our life: marriage. But do you think there is much fun in
marrying this or that young man whom I know as well as you do? I see them
as they are. I am not fortunate enough to be like your German Gretchens,
who can always create an illusion for themselves.... That is terrible,
isn't it? To look around and see girls who have married and their husbands,
and to think that one will have to do as they have done, be cramped in body
and mind, and become dull like them!... One needs to be stoical, I tell
you, to accept such a life with such obligations. All women are not capable
of it.... And time passes, the years go by, youth fades: and yet there were
lovely things and good things in us--all useless, for day by day they die,
and one has to surrender them to the fools and people whom one despises,
people who will despise oneself!... And nobody understands! One would
think that we were sphinxes. One can forgive the men who find us dull and
strange! But the women ought to understand us! They have been like us: they
have only to look back and remember.... But no. There is no help from them.
Even our mothers ignore us, and actually try not to know what we are. They
only try to get us married. For the rest, they say, live, die, do as you
like! Society absolutely abandons us."

"Don't lose heart," said Christophe. "Every one has to face the experience
of life all over again. If you are brave, it will be all right. Look
outside your own circle. There must be a few honest men in France."

"There are. I know. But they are so tedious!... And then, I tell you, I
detest the circle in which I live: but I don't think I could live outside
it, now. It has become a habit. I need a certain degree of comfort, certain
refinements of luxury and comfort, which, no doubt, money alone cannot
provide, though it is an indispensable factor. That sounds pretty poor, I
know. But I know myself: I am weak.... Please, please, don't draw away from
me because I tell you of my cowardice. Be kind and listen to me. It helps
me so to talk to you! I feel that you are strong and sound: I have such
confidence in you. Will you be my friend?"

Obituary: Donald Westlake

The disputed Holocaust memoir which was dropped from Penguin Group's publication schedule at the end of December is set to appear as a work of fiction.

Herman Rosenblat's memoir - which Oprah Winfrey called "the single greatest love story" she had heard in two decades in television - recounted how as a teenage boy in a Nazi concentration camp, he was kept alive by the food which was thrown to him by a young girl, Roma Radzicky. Penguin's US imprint Berkley Books had planned to publish the story, which sees Rosenblat reunited with Radzicky on a blind date years later, as Angel at the Fence: the True Story of a Love That Survived, next month.

But a Holocaust historian said it would have been impossible to approach the fence in the Schlieben concentration camp to throw food over it, concluding that this part of the story was made-up. Berkley initially defended the book, saying it was a work of memory, but then decided to cancel its planned publication, and demanded the return of the advance it had made to Rosenblat. A $25m film based on the book, to be called The Flower of the Fence, is still going ahead, with production due to start this year.

Publisher York House Press based in White Plains, New York, has entered into a tentative agreement with the film production company to publish a novel based on the film script early this spring. It said the book would be "grounded in fact", and would rise "to the proper levels of artistic value, ethical conduct and social responsibility".

A spokesperson for York House Press condemned the attacks which were made on the 80-year-old Rosenblat after the veracity of his story was questioned, describing them as a "savage" response to what was otherwise "a credible, heart-wrenching, and verifiable account" of his time in the concentration camp.

"No deliberate untruth is permissible, but beneath any fabrication is motivation and intent. We believe Mr. Rosenblat's motivations were very human, understandable and forgivable," the spokesperson said. "It is beyond our expertise to know how Holocaust survivors cope with their trauma. Do they deny, try to forget, rationalise or fantasise and promote fiction along with truth? Perhaps the coping mechanisms are as individual as the survivors themselves."

The president of the company producing the film, Harris Salomon from Atlantic Overseas Productions, said the book, "regardless of its shortcomings", would "challenge, educate and enlighten" readers about the horrors of the Holocaust. "The documented fact, acknowledged by his critics, is that Herman is a survivor of concentration camps," he said.

But Rosenblat's agent, Andrea Hurst, said that neither she nor Rosenblat were involved with this version of his story. "Usually book rights from films come out after the movie is released," she told guardian.co.uk. "I think the timing on this is very insensitive."

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Obama to feature in Marvel comic

We do not know the women's names, but their voices are quite distinct. All are pregnant. But while the first woman awaits the birth of her baby with a moon-like serenity, the other two are not so lucky. One, whose previous pregnancies have failed to go to term, is experiencing a heartbreaking late miscarriage; the other is a young student whose accidental pregnancy will end in her child being put up for adoption.

Sylvia Plath's only play was never intended for the stage, being broadcast instead on BBC radio in August 1962. Less than six months later, Plath killed herself, but not before the burst of astonishing creative energy that produced her extraordinary, terrifying Ariel poems.

Anyone who knows Plath's poetry will see the connection between Three Women and Plath's subsequent poems, particularly in the way she talks about the agony of childbirth, the rush of love for this tiny alien being, and both the wonder and wounded rawness of motherhood. It is a beautiful piece, full of startling imagery that draws you in through the sheer intensity of its femaleness, and because it so precisely articulates the emotions that are often thought but seldom voiced by women - certainly not in the early 1960s - about men, motherhood and our relationship to our bodies.

It's been 20 years since there has been an attempt at a professional stage version and - in a theatre world that happily accepts the poetic offerings of Sarah Kane and Debbie Tucker Green, or the staged possibilities of The Waves, one of Plath's own inspirations for the piece, I see no reason why it shouldn't be brought to life. Sadly, it doesn't breathe here, in a production by Robert Shaw that is clearly a labour of love, but which never finds a way to give the internal a physical reality. Plath's poetry, like most babies, is more robust than it appears - and won't break if treated with a little less reverence and considerably more grit.

Instead, what we are offered is tinkling piano music, mournful mood lighting, an innocuous pale setting, as well as three perfectly good but indisputably ladylike performances that capture none of the wounded redness of Plath's poetry, and do her the disservice of making her sound bleached and somewhat prissy. It's a pity. What might have been a wonder ends up a mere curiosity.

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Climbing the walls

Barack Obama is teaming up with Spider-Man in a comic from Marvel, which will see the future president exchanging a fist-bump with the superhero. The story sees one of Spidey's oldest enemies, the Chameleon, trying to stop Obama being inaugurated. Spider-Man's alter ego, Peter Parker, is covering the event as a photographer, and saves the day.

"Ya hear that, Chameleon?" Spider-Man says as he thwacks the villain in the face. "The president-elect here just appointed me ... secretary of shuttin' you up."

He tells Obama: "This is your day, and I know it wouldn't look good to be seen palling around with me" - in a nod to Sarah Palin's comment that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists".

"When we heard that president-elect Obama is a collector of Spider-Man comics, we knew that these two historic figures had to meet in our comics' Marvel Universe," said the publisher's editor-in-chief, Joe Quesada.

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