I find stories about doppelgängers, and particularly about someone taking over somebody else’s life, irresistible. The first of Tana French’s novels that I read was The Likeness and what attracted me was its premise: the discarded identity of a cop who used to work undercover is taken up by someone who looks just like her and who is later murdered. It’s a compelling setup, but the main substance of the book isn’t really dependent on it: it’s an exploration of the interactions between a close-knit and rather isolated small group of graduate students, and how the relationships between them are changed (and not changed) by the murder of the murder of the one who joined them most recently. But the reader is always conscious that the narrator has to pass as somebody else, someone who physically resembles her but about whose life and personality she knows very little.

The narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat (1957) likewise finds himself in a situation where he has to emulate behaviour and characteristics that, for the most part, he can only guess at. John is an Englishman, a lecturer in French history at an English university. He spends his holidays in France, travelling about and researching his subject. At a railway bar in Le Mans, he meets a man who looks and sounds exactly like him. His doppelgänger is Jean, le comte de Gué.

After an evening’s drinking, John wakes up to find that the comte has run off with John’s car, passport, money and everything else that was in his immediate possession. Jean’s manservant has come to the hotel, ready to drive him home. After some half-hearted attempts to protest that he is not the comte de Gué and that his own clothes and possessions have been stolen, John dresses in the comte’s clothes and allowes Gaston to take him to the château.

Only Jean’s retriever, César, recognizes that John isn’t who he’s pretending to be but, though he growls a bit and keeps his distance, César doesn’t attack the imposter. He apparently doesn’t understand that this newcomer is attempting to take the place of his master, who has been away and for some reason hasn’t yet returned. The other members of the family are puzzled by César’s hostility but don’t suspect the reason for it. The dog must be ill.

John has walked into a family about whose dynamics he hasn’t the remotest idea. The dowager comtesse is a morphine addict who rarely leaves her shuttered, overheated bedroom; Jean’s younger brother, Paul, discontentedly runs the glassworks on which whatever’s left of the family fortune is founded; like her husband, Paul’s wife Renée is bored and unhappy; Jean’s wife, Françoise, is in the late stages of pregnancy and desperately hoping for a boy; their ten-year-old daughter, Marie-Noel, seems at risk of developing into a religious fanatic under the tutelage of Blanche, the sister of Jean and Paul.

In spite of the things he gets ridiculously wrong, none of these people suspects that John is anything other than the genuine article. The fact that I didn’t find this at all credible did not impair my enjoyment of the story in the slightest. However indistinguishable the two men may have looked and sounded, and however much time the Englishman might have spent in France speaking the language, there would certainly be some turns of phrase and habits of speech, perhaps peculiar to the region, that he wouldn’t replicate. But our minds have a way of adjusting our perceptions, of making allowances to conform with what we expect to see and hear, and presumably that’s what happens in the case of this family.

When they met in Le Mans, Jean had been returning from Paris, where he had gone to try to negotiate a new contract with Carvalet, the main customer of the verrerie. His luggage contained wrapped and labeled presents from the capital for the various family members. The fact that the comtesse’s gift — a renewed supply of morphine — had had to be delivered secretly during the night should perhaps have alerted John to the private quality of some of the items, but he prefers to hand them over at lunchtime, in the hope of cheering up the recipients.

The presents for Marie-Noel and Françoise are unexceptionable, but Renée’s is “the flimsiest of nightgowns, gossamer light, a frivolity for brides on midsummer eve” (p. 83), while that for Paul is an elixir that implies he might be impotent. Everybody, particularly Marie-Noel, is incredulous that he has something for Blanche, as he never gives her presents. This, to his embarrassment, is the biggest faux pas of all: though the wrapping is marked with the initial “B”, the card inside is addressed to Béla; the gift is a large and expensive bottle of scent. Marie-Noel tells John that Blanche hasn’t spoken to her elder brother for 15 years.

Béla, as John discovers, is Jean’s mistress. (The masculine Hungarian name is a nickname he gave her because of her tendency to emphasize her nationality.) She lives in the nearby town of Villars where John pays a visit to the bank to try to get a picture of the family’s finances and business situation. He learns that Françoise’s father had been “a rich man with little faith in the stability of Jean de Gué, and no desire to bolster the tottering fortunes of the family of St Gilles” (p. 130). He had settled her large dowry in trust for her male heir. During the minority of some putative future son of Françoise, the income from the trust was to be paid to her and her husband. If she should not have a male heir, the money was to be divided between her and any daughters she might have, when she reached the age of 50. And, if she were to die before reaching that age, the money would be divided between such daughters and her husband. Hence her anxiety to have a male child.

John puts his foot in it again on Sunday, at la grande chasse, an annual hunt (with guns, of course, not hounds) of which Jean has always been the enthusiastic organizer. Not being able to shoot, John deliberately burns his hand as an excuse for handing the matter over to Paul. John, drunk, addresses the assembled hunters at the lunch afterwards, and raises the hackles of several neighbours by unintentionally appearing to disparage their conduct during the war.

Shortly after this, Françoise dies in a fall from her bedroom window. It looks for a while as if she might have deliberately killed herself, but Marie-Noel establishes that she was trying to recover the gift that her husband had bought for her in Paris, a locket, which had apparently fallen onto the ledge below the window. According to Marie-Noel, her mother was in the habit of shaking her duster out the window and the locket had apparently got caught in it. There was nobody else in the room with her, so at least there was no suspicion of homicide.

The death of Françoise means that half her dowry immediately vests in her husband, the other half being held in trust for Marie-Noel till she reaches full age. Up to that point, John has felt that every action he has taken since his arrival at the château has made the family’s predicament worse. Now, with his inheritance from Françoise, it seems that things are starting to get better. He has already committed the verrerie to remaining open and operating at a loss, even before he could see where the money would come from to make up the difference. He took this step because he was affected by the demeanour of some of the workers, and didn’t want to throw them out of work. However, when he remarks to Jacques, the clerk who administers the business’s office, that the important thing is that nobody should be out of work, the answer isn’t what he expects:

He raised his eyebrows. “Were you so concerned about the men?” he asked. “I hadn’t realized that. Actually, after the first shock they would soon have found employment. They’ve been prepared for a close-down for a long time.” (p. 162)

With the financial pressure off, John releases Paul from his role as manager and encourages him and Renée to travel, with Paul looking for new markets to open up. Blanche, who used to design glass ornaments, will take over the running of the foundry. (Blanche had been about to marry the then manager of the verrerie, Maurice Duval, when he will killed during the German occupation as a collaborator by a group of partisans, led by Jean.)

The newly happy state may not last, of course. Learning about his wife’s death, Jean decides to come back, after just an eventful week away. John resolves to kill the comte and take his place permanently, but his plan is frustrated when the local curé sees him with a handgun. Jean is disgruntled to discover that his stand-in has signed a contract with Carvalet that means he will have to support the loss-making business with part of his inheritance, but he is otherwise satisfied.

“That will break up the marriage even sooner,” he said. “Renée will find the lover she’s been searching for, and Paul feel himself more inferior than ever. Put him in the world and he’ll look what he knows he is — a provincial boor …” (p. 302)

Blanche could design “cheap gimcrack stuff to attract the tourist” so that they wouldn’t any longer be reliant on demanding firms like Carvalet.

A week earlier, Jean had swapped places with his English doppelgänger in order to escape from a family and circumstances that he was finding intolerable. Now, he is incredulous at John’s claim that he has attempted to set things right, not out of a desire to get his hands on Françoise’s money, but because he “loves” Jean’s family:

”You have the audacity to tell me,” he said, “that you love my mother, who is without exception the most egotistical, the most rapacious, the most monstrous woman I have, in all my experience, ever known; you love Paul, who is an oaf, a weakling and a thoroughly disagreeable personality; you love Renée — presumably for her body, which I grant you is enchanting, but she has a mind like an empty box … (p. 304)

Blanche is a religious fanatic and Marie-Noel can put on her sweetness and innocence for effect, at will. John doesn’t disagree with any of this but maintains that it doesn’t prevent him from loving them.

The comte de Gué has made changes to John’s life which may be even more fundamental than those that the latter has made to his. Before Françoise died, Jean had intended to assume the Englishman’s identity permanently. To that end, he resigned from John’s university job, surrendered the lease on his flat, emptied his bank account (which had a balance of £200) and arranged the sale of his furniture. John had been dissatisfied with his life before the swap — that, of course, is why he went along with it — but had no real idea of how to go about changing it. Now, he has no choice but to find out. Before the meeting in Le Mans, he had been about to visit a Trappist monastery in search, presumably, of some kind of spiritual solution. At the novel’s end, he has resumed his way there.

The two doppelgängers are alike in other ways as well as physically. Their attitudes to existence are similar, though the comte is more openly cynical. He assures John:

“… I have learnt one thing in life, which is that the only motive force in human nature is greed. Insects, animals, men, women, children, we live by greed alone. It’s not very pretty, but what of it? The thing to do is to minister to the greed, and to give people what they want. The trouble is, they are never satisfied.” (p. 21)

Having lived the other man’s life for a few days, John quickly formed a poor impression of his counterpart’s character.

It might have been an inspiration to take on the role of someone fine — the change of skin would have acted as a spur to endeavour. Instead, I had exchanged my own negligible self for a worthless personality. He had the supreme advantage over me in that he had not cared. Or had he, after all? Was this why he had disappeared? (p. 96)

In the end, each man resumes his own character, personality and life, which has in the meantime been changed by the other. As to whether those changes will persist, the novel doesn’t reach a conclusion.

Edition: Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat, Pan paperbacks 1975.

The next post, in two weeks’ time, is probably going to be about Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone unless I have other ideas in the meantime.