My sense of power was unbounded... I felt my bluff to be superb, and it must have worked... My self-confidence mounting every moment... I recalled my success the night before... little scraps of family history fell on my ear... what I gleaned would have to be sorted and sifted at leisure." Due to his depression - he walked the streets at night in the rain and knew he must get drunk. He also was thinking of spending a few days at a monastery in hopes of finding the courage to go on living before returning to England. Oddly, though, the term ‘scapegoat’ is something of a translation error (as these things so often are). The original Hebrew text of Leviticus should more properly be translated into English as ‘And Aaron shall cast lots upon the two goats; one lot for the LORD, and the other lot for Azazel’. ‘For Azazel’: not ‘for the scapegoat’. But who, then, was Azazel? Yet another Daphne du Maurier book that I struggled... to put down! French language academic John is astonished to bump into his exact doppelganger at a provincial French train station. John, an English lecturer in French history, is on holiday in France. In Le Mans, he meets a French count, Jean de Gué, who looks and sounds exactly like him. 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. 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.

Anyone that has ever hungered to be a part of a group, but yet always felt as a stranger, will relate to John here. What should happen, however, if you had the opportunity to take someone’s place? Would you do it? When John bumps into an exact likeness of himself in a tavern, he is given precisely this chance. While John is a lonely man with a feeling of emptiness inside, Comte Jean de Gué claims to have only the problem of having too many ‘human’ possessions. Jean wants to play a clever game – that of switching identities with John and assuming each other’s lives. When John wakes the next morning, stripped of his own clothes and everything he had on his person, what choice does he have but to put on another man’s clothes, take his suitcase and assume this new life? The film makes no mention of the earlier murder of Maurice Duval. The incident in which John deliberately burns his hand to avoid taking part in the shoot does not occur in the film, nor does his wife's fall from the bedroom window or her subsequent death. In the film, Spence surreptitiously enters the house during the shoot and manipulates Frances into taking an overdose of morphine. Standing arrives in time to save her. Both believers and non-believers know the famous Bible verse, John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that he who believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Those who accept the truth of that verse and surrender their lives to Jesus as their Lord and Savior will have everlasting life in heaven with Him. Those who do not will fall victim to their own selfishness and will be separated from God for eternity. Towards the conclusion, the identification, or perhaps the confusion or melding of the two characters John/Jean, becomes ever more apparent. Here John refers to an event long past, but seems to also draws truths from it about his doppelgänger,when Marie-Noel had gone missing, Françoise worried that 'the child might have turned against her. She is too fond of her papa, she said, and of Mademoiselle Blanche' Even the structure of this one sentence gives the impression of hurtling towards doom. It does not let up; there is no break. There are significant differences between this adaptation and the original novel. While the action of the novel takes place in France, the screen version is set in England. All of the main characters are British. The novel's narrator (known only as John in the book) is named John Standing in the film, his wife (Françoise) is re-named Frances and his doppelgänger (Jean de Gué) is called Johnny Spence. Some of the other characters' names have also been changed. from the chateau- 'none of these people under his roof would be behaving as they had behaved tonight but for something he had done to them' (p.76)-but he sees an opportunity for himself to put it right.

John, our narrator, is a lonely academic, someone who always felt like an observer rather than a participant in life. Jean, on the other hand, describes himself as a "family man" who evidently doesn't enjoy the title and is only too happy to jump ship. Daphne du Maurier was obsessed with the past. She intensively researched the lives of Francis and Anthony Bacon, the history of Cornwall, the Regency period, and nineteenth-century France and England. Above all, however, she was obsessed with her own family history, which she chronicled in Gerald: A Portrait, a biography of her father; The du Mauriers, a study of her family which focused on her grandfather, George du Maurier, the novelist and illustrator for Punch; The Glassblowers, a novel based upon the lives of her du Maurier ancestors; and Growing Pains, an autobiography that ignores nearly 50 years of her life in favour of the joyful and more romantic period of her youth. Daphne du Maurier can best be understood in terms of her remarkable and paradoxical family, the ghosts which haunted her life and fiction. It held my interest pretty much throughout, although maybe about two-thirds of the way through my interest flagged but then accelerated again — just a minor bump in the road. Otherwise I think I would have rated it as ‘5’ rather than ‘4’…but in my rating system a ‘4’ is “a memorable read and if there is anything else the author has written I would be quite interested in it”, thank you very much.

Why Is This So Radical?

John is left to himself in a strange château, with a strange new identity and even stranger new family.

Leviticus 16:30 is also a key verse in our look toward Jesus as our Scapegoat, “For on this day shall atonement be made for you to cleanse you. You shall be clean before the Lord from all your sins.” Why Is Jesus Our Scapegoat? The practice of scapegoating in the Old Testament can also be said to prefigure the ultimate scapegoat in the New Testament: Jesus Christ. For Christians, Jesus took all the sins of mankind upon himself and allowed himself to be crucified for them, so that those who follow him might be forgiven for those sins. Daphne du Maurier by Margaret Forster (Chatto & Windus 1993) (Published in the US as Daphne du Maurier - The Secret World of the Renowned Storyteller (Doubleday 1993)). N goes to the Van Gelders' house, where he thinks to himself that Ann Van Gelder looks like an “old shoe” (205). However, he has clearly spoken aloud, because Ann repeats what he has said. Gerry Van Gelder says that Kirstie Johanssen is missing. N faints, and when he wakes up he is handcuffed to a bed and there is a strange older man in the room with him. N remembers the only time he saw his father on the university campus. It was 20 years ago and his father was standing next to the Burghers of Calais sculptures, which had been covered with canvas and rope. Do you know so little about children, Monsieur Jean,’ she asked, ‘that you imagine, because they don’t cry, therefore they feel nothing? If so, you’re much mistaken.”

So, what happens when you come face to face with your exact double but wake up the next day only to find that he/she has switched identities with you? You might feel like you have no choice but to play along. Let the chauffeur take you home to a chateau full of depressed and embittered family members. Throw in a couple of religious fanatics just for good measure. Next, you might actually begin to think that you can help these people if you can just avoid detection long enough. I think you're getting the idea. I'm actually still a bit unnerved by this macabre tale and I will be thinking about this thriller for many days, probably weeks. What Daphne du Maurier achieved is a well-crafted and suspenseful mystery that pulled me into the story very swiftly and even though I've closed the cover I still feel like a deer staring into headlights. I can't quite pull myself away from the events and the characters, so I'm at a standstill. The Scapegoat is the tale of one man who was trapped into impersonating another, living as husband of a saddened wife, father of a fanciful child, manager of a glass-making concern, and son of an aging, dope-addled mother. Zatelli, Ida (1998). "The Origin of the Biblical Scapegoat Ritual: The Evidence of Two Eblaite Texts". Vetus Testamentum. 48 (2): 254–263. doi: 10.1163/1568533982721604. ISSN 0042-4935. JSTOR 1585505. Probably some time around half way through the book I realised that I’d put aside all my concerns regarding the realism of the story in favour of just enjoying the tale. From this point on it was easy – and hugely enjoyable. As I approached the end I started to worry whether du Maurier would land a bail out happy ending on her readers, even though I couldn’t really work out what this would look like. I needn’t have worried, the story was tied up brilliantly and in a way I couldn’t have foreseen. All of the action takes place within one week, yet so much is learned of the past that the book seems to span a generation.