Laetitia Casta in the 2000 TV series La Bicyclette Bleue

I had wondered about this before, whether novels, like films, were ever “remade” (of course they are remade, there are only so many stories to tell (how many?), most of them involving love and family and strife, but I was looking for more blatant examples). Leaving aside the most famous and blatant effort by Jorge Luis Borges – whose Pierre Menard sets out to re-write Don Quixotte word for word and then praise the text to be so much better than the original- I came across the example of Régine Deforges’s La Bicyclette Bleue which is partly a remake of Gone With the Wind.

From Resa Dudovitz book (see previous post)

“When I asked Ms Deforges about the similarity between her novel and Gone With the Wind, she admitted that hers is a remake of Mitchell’s but that after the first hundred pages, she left Mitchell’s novel to write a completely different story. Neither Mitchell’s novel nor her characters, she told me, fit with the story she wanted to tell.”

However, The Blue Bicycle followed Mitchell’s novel to such an extent that Margaret Mitchell’s estate instituted a copyright infringement suit against the French author which Ms Deforges won on the ground that the novels are two separate and distinct works.

Via Reuters:

A French appeals court here today cleared the author Regine Deforges of charges that she plagiarized the novel “Gone With the Wind” in her own best seller. The court said Miss Deforges’s 1982 novel, “The Blue Bicycle,” which sold six million copies and which was translated into 18 languages, was “an original intellectual creation.” It reversed a lower court ruling ordering Miss Deforges to pay $400,000 in damages to the Trust Company Bank in Atlanta which holds rights to “Gone With the Wind,” the 1936 novel by Margaret Mitchell. “The Blue Bicycle” is a love story set during the Nazi occupation of France. The appeals court agreed that Miss Deforges’s book began with a character similar to Miss Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara. But it said the two novels then followed different paths. The Trust Company Bank was sentenced to pay court costs. Miss Deforges’s lawyers said work on a screen adaptation of “The Blue Bicycle,” which was halted when the trial began, would resume immediately. —November 22, 1990