A queen and her bondmaid gave birth on the same night. The midwife—curious about what would happen, or perhaps driven by something darker she could not name—switched the babies. The king's true son was placed in the servant's cradle. The servant's son was placed in the royal crib. No one else knew.
The children grew up. The servant's biological son, raised as a prince, was elevated to power and privilege. He received the finest education, wore the finest clothing, and was treated with the deference owed to the heir of a kingdom. The king's biological son, raised as a servant's child, grew up in poverty and obscurity, working with his hands, eating plain food, sleeping in a servant's quarters.
But something in each boy's nature resisted his upbringing. The true prince, raised among servants, was drawn to royal bearing—he walked with dignity that no one had taught him, he spoke with authority that surprised everyone who heard it. The servant's son, raised in the palace, had instincts that pulled him away from kingship—he was restless on the throne, uncomfortable with ceremony, drawn to coarser pleasures that embarrassed the court.
The midwife, being "light-minded" as the Talmud says of those who cannot keep secrets, eventually whispered the truth to someone. That person told another. The whisper spread through the kingdom in widening circles: the prince is not the prince. But no one could say it publicly. What would the king do with such information? He could not trust a rumor. He could not undo the switch based on gossip. The truth was everywhere and nowhere—known by all, actionable by none.
Eventually the switched prince discovered the truth about himself. He was not the king's son. The servant boy he had grown up alongside—the one he had looked down on his entire life—was the real heir. Now he faced a terrible choice: cling to his stolen identity and the power that came with it, or acknowledge who he really was and lose everything he had ever known.
Rabbi Nachman's eleventh tale is about identity at its most fundamental level. The switch is the soul placed in the wrong body—or the right body placed in the wrong world. The true prince who grows up as a servant carries royalty in his blood but has no throne to claim it. The false prince sits on the throne but cannot shake the feeling that he does not belong there, that the crown on his head was meant for someone else.
In the Kabbalistic reading, this is the human condition itself. Divine souls are placed in animal bodies. Royal sparks are trapped in the husks of the material world. Every person senses dimly that they were meant for something other than what they were given. The switch happened before consciousness—before memory, before choice—and the work of an entire lifetime is to discover who you really are beneath the identity you were assigned.