The Scapegoat by Daphne du Maurier

This person who walked around wearing another's clothes, parading his features, colouring and manners, was guiltless, he was merely a covering, a facade, as remote from its original as a violin case from the instrument it protects. Emotion should have no part in this. I had never for one moment been so blind as to imagine that any show of warmth coming from these people was due to qualities of my own, springing suddenly to the surface and finding a response: they came alight for him and him only, however misplaced hte glow. What was happening, then, was that I wanted to preserve Jean de Gue from degradation. I could not bear to see him shamed. This man, who was not worth the saving, must be spared. Why? Because he looked like me?

John is an Englishman, a professor of French history, who longs for a life of human connection. He has no wife, no family or friends; he spends most of the time he's not teaching wandering through French towns and gazing wistfully at lighted windows there, yearning to be a part of what he passes. In Le Mans one day he encounters a shocking site: a man who looks exactly like himself. John's doppelganger, a Frenchman named Jean de Gue, draws him into a night of debauchery, and when John awakes from it he finds that de Gue has swapped all of their clothes and possessions. Well, what is he to do but to follow the address he finds on de Gue's effects, and take up residence with his family, pretending to be his own double?

The life John/Jean takes up is a troubled one: de Gue, it turns out, is a provincial Comte who owns a struggling glass foundry, which is managed by his envious brother, Paul. The Comte de Gue has been having an affair with Paul's wife, Renee, while his own wife Francoise suffers from a difficult pregnancy. His mother, Maman, is addicted to morphine, and his daughter Marie-Noel is obsessed with the idea of becoming a saint, and suffering for the satisfaction of God. In this pursuit she is tutored by the Comte's religious sister, Blanche, who has not spoken to him in many years. As John insinuates himself into the family, he begins to piece together the Comte de Gue's dark secrets, including his part in the murder of the foundry's former manager, who may or may not have collaborated during the Nazi occupation of France. Except they aren't secrets: everyone knows all about the Comte's past, it seems, though it isn't spoken about openly. John, in the role of the Comte, is the only one who doesn't know the truth about himself.

The elegant concept of The Scapegoat really seems like something only du Maurier could invent. There's no big secret here a la Rebecca, but John's inherent ignorance, and the impenetrability of his disguise, make for gripping reading. Like John, you long to find out the truth about the de Gue family. Why are they so resentful toward one another, so recriminating? It doesn't matter how scandalous the answer is, because the knowledge seems just beyond the limit of investigation: there's no one, and no way, to ask. But the interest of The Scapegoat lies in the characters as well as the premise, characters who, like in other du Maurier books, seem to have been lifted from the Gothic novels of a hundred years prior: bitter Blanche, imperious Maman, pious Marie-Noel. John, too, becomes drawn into their lives. What seems at first like a lark, a chance to live another man's life without consequences, without being touched, becomes a tangle, like a trap. John finds himself caring for the broken family, eager to fix what the Comte--by all accounts a selfish person--has led to ruin.

Rebecca is du Maurier's masterpiece, but I think The Scapegoat might be my new personal favorite. I really couldn't put it down. Like all good novels about doubling and imitation, the lines become quickly blurred. When John inserts himself into the Comte's life, looking and acting like the Comte, who's to say he is not the Comte? If Marie-Noel breaks her mother's porcelain figurine, what does it matter if she receives a replacement, rather than the original, mended? Is it possible to borrow a man's identity, but not his history? These are interesting questions the novel asks, that give it heft and weight, but they're almost beside the point when it's so gripping.