A chameleon changes color to match its environment.

Bourdin changed identity to match the expectations of whoever he needed to convince at any given moment.

The skill is real, the adaptation is genuine, but the chameleon has no fixed form of its own.

Whether Bourdin has found — in his reported marriage and family life in France — a fixed identity that he inhabits genuinely is a question that his history makes genuinely unanswerable.

It is possible that domestic life and fatherhood gave him what the impersonations always sought but could never provide.