There he meets his doppelgänger's family: Jean's feeble, pregnant wife Françoise and over-imaginative young daughter Marie-Noel his dull brother Paul and embittered sister Blanche Paul's frustrated wife (and Jean's mistress) Renée and Jean's elderly, morphine-addicted mother. Next day he wakes to find his clothes and possessions gone, with Jean's chauffeur urging him to get dressed (in Jean's clothes which are left for him) and come home to the ancestral château. As the two drink together, John confesses that he is depressed, feeling as though his outward life is a meaningless façade, and the pair move on to a hotel where John passes out. In Le Mans, he meets a French count, Jean de Gué, who looks and sounds exactly like him. John, an English lecturer in French history, is on holiday in France. The story has been the basis of two films: one in 1959 starring Sir Alec Guinness and Bette Davis and one in 2012 starring Matthew Rhys. In a bar in France, a lonely English academic on holiday meets his double, a French aristocrat who gets him drunk, swaps identities and disappears, leaving the Englishman to sort out the Frenchman's extensive financial and family problems. The Scapegoat is a 1957 novel by Daphne du Maurier.
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