Balzac, Dumas and Hugo had their differences. but they all share the common basic belief that introducing their mysterious protagonist through their most recent disguise is a hell of a power move
Umberto Eco once wrote "I Am Edmond Dantès!", an essay on the literary device of recognition (or anagnorisis, if we wanna get fancy: "when a character unexpectedly discovers (by another person’s revealing it, or by discovering a necklace or a scar) that someone else is his father or son or worse still, as when Oedipus realizes that Jocasta, the woman he has married, is his mother") in French serialised novels, aka feuilletons.
Feuilletons kinda went overboard with this. Everyone did it at least once, and Monte Christo dramatically reveals himself like a hundred times. And at least in this case it works, it's still satisfying, but in other, less famous feuilletons, the repetition kills the drama, you got dozens of characters recognised as someone else in the same novel, and it's redundant and pointless.
He gives one exceptionally silly example (Ponson du Terrail’s Le forgeron de la Cour-Dieu, never heard of it) where the recognitions in the story go like this:
Dom Jérôme reveals who he is to Jeanne; Dom Jérôme reveals who he is to Mazures; the comtesse des Mazures, from Valognes’s description, recognizes Jeanne as the sister of Aurore; from the portrait in the small box left to her by her mother, Aurore recognizes Jeanne as her sister; Aurore, while reading her mother’s letter, recognizes old Benjamin as Fritz; Lucien learns from Aurore that Jeanne is her sister (and that his mother killed their mother); Raoul de la Maurelière realizes that César is the son of Blaisot and that his temptress is the comtesse des Mazures; Lucien, after wounding Maurelière in a duel, discovers under his shirt a medallion with the portrait of Gretchen;
…and it goes on like this for a whole page, it's hilarious.
Relevant to the OP, he also says, "A useful element for the successful outcome of an anagnorisis is disguise: by removing his mask, the person disguised increases the other characters’ surprise; and the reader either shares that surprise or, having seen through the disguise, enjoys the surprise of the unsuspecting characters."
And he ends the essay by stitching together in a single 6-page paragraph a whole mess of recognition scenes from the genre, from Dantès and Valjean to completely unknown (hah!) characters, it's a torrent of ridiculousness, I love it.
(essay found in Umberto Eco, Inventing the Enemy and Other Occasional Writings)