We are left with questions about the family’s knowledge and the family’s choices — questions that Bourdin’s accusations raised but that the evidence cannot resolve, and that the most important potential witness took to his grave with a drug overdose.

We are left with the psychological portrait of Frédéric Bourdin — a person whose unusual capabilities in the service of deception emerged from circumstances of genuine deprivation and neglect, who found in impersonation a response to needs that could not be met legitimately, and who paid a significant price for that response without, apparently, fully abandoning it.

And we are left with the case as a study in human vulnerability — in the power of grief and hope to shape perception, in the limitations of institutional verification systems, in the gap between social identity and biological identity that a sufficiently sophisticated deceiver can exploit.

None of these things have simple resolutions.