The Scapegoat (novel)
First US edition
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| Author | Daphne du Maurier |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Crime fiction |
| Publisher |
Victor Gollancz (UK) Doubleday (US) |
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Publication date
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1957 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Pages | 368 pp. |
| OCLC | 4542871 |
The Scapegoat is a 1957 novel by Daphne du Maurier. In 1959, it was made into a film of the same name, starring Sir Alec Guinness. It was also the basis of a film broadcast in 2012 starring Matthew Rhys and written and directed by Charles Sturridge.
The plot concerns an Englishman who meets his double, a French , while visiting France, and is forced into changing places with him. The Englishman is a single, rather lonely academic, and he finds himself caught up in all the intrigues and passions of his double's complex family.
John, an English lecturer in French history, is on holiday in France. In Le Mans, he encounters a French Comte, Jean de Gué, who looks and sounds exactly like him. The two lookalikes have a drink, and John confesses that he is depressed, feeling as though his outward life is a meaningless façade. They retire to a hotel where they continue to drink and eventually swap clothes. John passes out; when he awakes, Jean has disappeared, and a chauffeur mistakes him for Jean. Deciding to take on Jean's identity, John gets in the Comte's car.
At a chateau in St. Gilles, John meets his doppelganger's family: Jean's pregnant wife Françoise; Jean's brother Paul and embittered sister Blanche; Paul's wife Renée (whom John later learns has been having an affair with Jean); Jean's elderly, morphine-addicted mother; and Jean and Françoise's young daughter Marie-Noel. Believing Jean must have acted wrongly to want to escape this life, John spends the following week trying to make things right.
John sees the verrerie (glass-works) and learns that Jean was in Paris to try to save the family's glass business by renegotiating a contract with the firm Carvalet, but the deal fell through. John calls Carvalet and agrees to accept their terms.
The next day, John goes to the bank in Villars to investigate Jean's finances. There, he learns that Françoise's dowry is in trust for a male heir; if she dies or reaches the age of 50 without having had a son, Jean will inherit the money instead. John also runs into Béla, another of Jean's mistresses, and tells her the truth about the Carvalet contract. She becomes suspicious about his sudden concern for the verrerie and its workforce.
John learns of Maurice Duval, the former head of the verrerie, who was killed during the German Occupation. Marie-Noel goes missing, and everyone but Françoise searches for her. When she's found in the well at the verrerie, John discovers it was Jean and his men who killed Duval and left him in the well, accusing him of being a Nazi collaborator; Marie-Noel climbed down the well as an act of penitence on behalf of her father. John also realizes Blanche had a relationship with Duval.
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