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. A new film version, to be directed by Charles Sturridge, is currently in production. The plot concerns an Englishman who meets his double, a French aristocrat, 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. 'I left the car by the side of the cathedral, and then walked down the steps into the Place... des Jacobins. It was still raining hard. It had not once let up since Tours, and all I had seen of the countryside I loved was the gleaming surface of the route nationale, rhythmically cut by the monotonous swing of the windscreen-wiper. Outside Le Mans, the depression that had grown upon me during the past twenty-fours had intensified.' The Scapegoat is narrated by John, an Englishman and lecturer in French history at a London university, who is coming to the end of his holiday in France.
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