What’s the closest thing in C++ to retroactively defining a superclass of a defined class?

You can do the following:

class C
{
  struct Interface
  {
    virtual void bar() = 0;
    virtual ~Interface(){}
  };

  template <class T>
  struct Interfacer : Interface
  {
    T t;
    Interfacer(T t):t(t){}
    void bar() { t.bar(); }
  };

  std::unique_ptr<Interface> interface;

  public:
    template <class T>
    C(const T & t): interface(new Interfacer<T>(t)){}
    void bar() { interface->bar(); }
};

The idea is to use type-erasure (that’s the Interface and Interfacer<T> classes) under the covers to allow C to take anything that you can call bar on and then your library will take objects of type C.