Ferdinando Eboli

It is set in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars and tells the story of an Italian man named Count Ferdinando Eboli whose identity is stolen by his illegitimate older brother.

While performing this mission, Ferdinand is ambushed and taken to a remote shack, where he is given peasant's clothes in exchange for his own and is tied up and left by his attackers.

When he arrives, he is arrested as a spy, and when he is brought before the king he confronts a man who looks exactly like him and is wearing his stolen clothes.

He offers to have him freed if he signs a statement acknowledging the imposter as the true Eboli, but Ferdinand refuses.

She does manage to escape, however, by disguising herself as a page, but is forced to take shelter in what appears to be a banditto's cave after becoming lost in the woods.

Ferdinand would have suffered the same fate, but is captured by the enemy and eventually liberated after Napoleon's exile to Elba.

Other examples of nineteenth-century Gothic fiction that employ this motif include James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

[4] It is more accurately categorized as a Gothic tale: one that describes a strange or supernatural experience, often by a first- or third-person narrator.