Imposture and mistaken identity

Imposture and mistaken identity are more than disguises in the novel’s late revelations: they repeatedly make a familiar face or a trusted identity unreliable, redirect suspicion, and force the characters to revise what they think they know. The pattern reaches its culmination when Anthony Cade reveals that he is Prince Nicholas Obolovitch, a man who had deliberately made himself believed dead and adopted a new name.

Substitution and Suspicion

Anthony’s first suspicions about Mademoiselle Brun arise from a light in her room on the night of the murder. He later investigates her in Brittany and, persuaded by the Comtesse de Breteuil’s account of employing a governess by that name, accepts that the woman at Chimneys is genuine. He recognizes too late the possibility that the real Mademoiselle Brun was kidnapped on her way to the new post and replaced by an impostor. A corroborating reference had seemed to settle the woman’s identity; instead, it concealed the possibility of substitution.

The woman’s face is another clue whose meaning shifts. Virginia Revel appears to recognize her, but Anthony recalls that Virginia said the face was familiar only after he mentioned the woman’s connection to the Comtesse de Breteuil. That qualification matters: it does not establish that Virginia knew the supposed governess personally. Anthony concludes instead that it is important to prevent Virginia from recognizing the woman, because Virginia is the only member of the house party who had been to Herzoslovakia. The impostor’s identity is thus connected both to the country’s political history and to the risk of being recognized by someone with relevant experience.

False Leads and Competing Identities

The murder at Chimneys adds another layer of misdirection. A deliberate plot was formed to keep Virginia away, and a dead body served that purpose. Although the Comrades of the Red Hand committed the murder to punish what they regarded as the victim’s treachery, the staging and the absence of the group’s customary sign suggested to Anthony that a more capable intelligence was directing events. The apparent political crime and its presentation do not point neatly to the same actor or purpose.

Anthony initially suspects that someone is impersonating Prince Michael, but recognizes that this theory is mistaken. He also shifts his suspicions toward Mr Fish before learning, after their encounter in Dover and mutual explanation, that Fish is a Pinkerton’s man pursuing King Victor. This knowledge sends Anthony’s suspicions back to the woman who has been passing as Mademoiselle Brun. The sequence shows how mistaken identity works as a system of competing explanations: a false assumption about one person can obscure the imposture of another, and each new identification changes the meaning of earlier clues.

The Dover Reversal

At Dover, Anthony and Fish find a mysterious stranger imprisoned. Hearing the stranger’s account makes them recognize a pattern already encountered: the real person has been kidnapped, and a substitute has taken his place. This time, the false identity is King Victor himself, who has assumed the identity of the French investigator, M. Lemoine. Superintendent Battle had already distrusted his supposed French colleague and had sent to Paris for fingerprints and other means of identification.

Anthony understands how the impostor exploits the investigation’s uncertainty. After Anthony supplies a false tip about the stone’s location, the false M. Lemoine wants to pass the information to an accomplice while keeping everyone else in the room. He sends a note to Mademoiselle Brun through Tredwell, who takes it upstairs to the schoolroom. The impostor then accuses Anthony of being King Victor, creating a diversion that keeps the others occupied. By the time the party goes to the library to look for the stone, he expects his accomplice to have removed it. Anthony’s account makes clear that false identities are not merely concealed biographies: they are practical tools for controlling who is believed, who moves, and what the other characters are able to investigate.

The Name Anthony Cade

The pattern finally turns inward. When Herman Isaacstein asks whether the same loan offered to Prince Michael could be made to his cousin Nicholas, Anthony answers the question by disclosing that he is the promised prince. He explains that he had spread the report of his own death in the Congo; he describes himself as having been killed only in the sense that the report of his death was his own invention. He then gives his full royal name, Nicholas Sergius Alexander Ferdinand Obolovitch, and says that he emerged from the Congo as plain Anthony Cade because the longer identity did not suit the life he intended to lead.

This revelation changes the meaning of the name that has carried the story. Anthony has not simply been mistaken for a prince: he is Prince Nicholas, and the apparent absence of the claimant has been produced by his own deliberate concealment. The different impostures therefore have different moral and practical shapes. King Victor uses another man’s identity to deceive and maneuver others; Anthony’s assumed ordinary name hides his birth and allows him to live apart from the life attached to it. The novel brings those disguises together at the moment when the hidden prince steps forward, turning mistaken identity from a source of confusion into the means of resolving the political and personal question of who Nicholas is.