Sequels Are Popping Up Across the World of Books

First, Margaret Mitchell, and now, helas, Victor Hugo. Javert, the villainous police inspector who pursues sinner-turned-saint Jean Valjean relentlessly through the pages of Hugo’s epic 19th century novel, “Les Miserables,” has been resurrected in the pages of a new unauthorized sequel.

And Hugo’s descendants are furieux. Indeed, they have filed suit asking for damages of more than $600,000 and are seeking to ban “Cosette ou de Temps des Illusions” (“Cosette or the Time of Illusions”) by French novelist Francois Ceresa, published last week.

“Hugo was a giant,” says Albert Sonnenfeld, professor of French and comparative literature at USC, “a larger-than-life figure. His burial was like [John F.] Kennedy’s funeral.” Today, he rests with France’s greatest at the Pantheon in Paris.

Sonnenfeld, who was reached in Paris, is not a Hugo fan (“I don’t like populist stuff. I’m a Henry James, Gustave Flaubert ironist”) but acknowledges that Hugo was “sort of the Napoleon of letters. He and Balzac are the two titans of 19th century French letters.”

In fighting for Hugo’s reputation, his great-great-grandson Pierre Hugo, cites a breach of French law that protects the integrity of works of art. He has asked the French writers’ guild--which Hugo helped found--to back him. The Society of Friends of Victor Hugo has damned the book.

“They’re arguing that the body of [Hugo’s] book is being attacked,” explained Pierre Hourcade, a French-born lawyer who practices in Paris and in Los Angeles. “In French law, it’s called a moral right. It basically means you can’t alter the spirit of the book.”

And alter it Ceresa has. Hugo had a disillusioned Javert leap to his death in the river Seine. He points out that by reviving Hugo’s Javert and turning him into a good guy, Ceresa’s book violates that spirit. “It touches a very sensitive chord, not only with the writers’ guild and the Hugo family, but also the general public.”

French people, he said, are “more conservative” about these matters. “It is shocking to French people. It would be like making a new ‘Mona Lisa.’ ‘Les Miserables’ is in the French psyche. Everybody knows ‘Les Miserables.’ ”

Pierre Hugo recalled his great-great-grandfather’s remark on “Les Miserables”: “If this end doesn’t move people, I renounce forever writing.” Now, more than a century later, someone has rewritten that ending.

The French literary dispute neatly mirrors a legal tussle in the United States. Only last month, a federal judge in Atlanta issued an injunction halting Houghton Mifflin’s planned June publication of Alice Randall’s “The Wind Done Gone,” agreeing with the estate of “Gone With the Wind” author Mitchell that the work infringed on her copyright and included “wholesale theft of major characters.”

Randall, an African American, had argued that her book, which depicts 19th century Southern plantation life from the viewpoint of an African American--in this case, a fictional former slave who’s a half-sister to Scarlett O’Hara--is a parody, not a sequel. An appeal is pending.

In an interview in Paris Match in April, Ceresa said he would accept “the critics of the temple guardians, but I would at least like them to read my book before throwing it in the bin.” His book, for which he received a $50,000 advance, is getting a $200,000-promotion blitz from the French publisher, Plon.

As for his plot line, Ceresa, known for his action novels, told the newspaper Le Figaro that it was perfectly plausible that “someone could have fished [Javert] out and revived him.”

A spokeswoman for Vivendi Universal in New York, the parent company whose publishing division includes Plon, said she did not know if there are plans to publish Ceresa’s book in English. The book debuted with an initial printing of 70,000, and Plon plans to publish a second installment of Ceresa’s sequel, “Marius or the Fugitive,” in the fall.

Plon chairman Olivier Orban, according to Reuters, called the brouhaha “absolutely preposterous” in that “Les Miserables” has already been the basis for a blockbuster musical, and another Hugo classic, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” was made into a Disney animated film.

Call it parody, plagiarism or sequelization, once-upon-a-time-one-more-time is the idea for a spate of recent books. Of course, literary borrowing isn’t exactly new--Aeschylus borrowed from Homer; Shakespeare borrowed many plots.

In 1999, writer Pia Pera dodged a legal bullet with her take on Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Her novel, originally published in Italian, was published in English only after she and publisher Foxrock agreed to include a preface by the author’s son, Dmitri, and to split the author’s royalties with PEN, the writers group.

In Pera’s tale, “Lo’s Diary,” the onetime nymphet Lolita is married and living in Paris, and the 85-year-old pedophile, Humbert Humbert--renamed Humbert Guibert--has retired to the Riviera with his young mulatto wife, who’s the daughter of his cook.

Fans of the classic film “Casablanca” were horrified by Michael Walsh’s 1998 novel for Warner Books, “As Time Goes By.” In that case, Walsh was writing a sequel not to a book but to a film and the play on which it was based, “Everybody Comes to Rick’s.”

But purists did not take kindly to Walsh’s updating, in which the major characters escape from Morocco and wind up taking part in “Operation Hangman,” a British government plot to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of Hitler’s “final solution.” Rick and Ilsa get married, and she utters the book’s last line, “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

As for rewriting Hugo to bring back Javert, USC’s Sonnenfeld says, “You know that’s based on . . . Sherlock Holmes.” Having written book after book about his detective, Arthur Conan Doyle had grown tired of him. Sonnenfeld says Doyle was into Indian mysticism by then and “decided to kill off Holmes in a famous fight with his archenemy, the evil Professor Moriarty. And he supposedly drowned, but since his body was never found, pressure from readers was so intense that Doyle had to bring him back for further adventures.”

If Doyle could do it, he asks, why not Ceresa? “It sounds like a great idea for somebody to make a buck. [‘Les Miserables’] was a two-Kleenex musical. Why not milk a few more dollars out of it?”

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Researcher Sarah White in The Times’ Paris bureau contributed to this article.