The Rich Brother and the Poor Brother

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The Rich Brother and the Poor Brother is a Portuguese fairy tale. Andrew Lang included it in The Lilac Fairy Book.^[1]

[edit] Synopsis

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

A rich old man had lost his wife but had two sons. The older lived with him and the younger in the city. One day, the man learned that his older son had married secretly; he turned him out, sent for his brother, and made him his only heir. He died and left his estate, which was not as good as it was, to the younger son; he had even had to leave some houses in the city unfinished. Meanwhile, the older son and his wife had lived in poverty. One day he begged his brother to give him the unfinished houses, and the brother agreed.

The brother married a woman, wealthy but greedy, and one day she went to the city and saw the houses. She made her husband go to law again and again to try to get them back. One day, they went to the highest court. They stopped by a farm, where the farmer fed the rich brother and grudgingly permitted the poor brother to stay; his wife asked for one of the poor brother's onions, was ill in the night, and blamed the onion, so that the farmer beat the poor brother until the rich brother demanded that he go to court to complain and stop beating him.

The rich brother and the farmer set out on horseback, and the poor brother helped a muleteer with his mule, stuck in the mud, but the muleteer went on without him. The poor brother decided he would never reach court in time, and one or the other case would go against him, so he might as well kill himself, but it was too dark to be sure of it, so he went to sleep. In the morning, he jumped over a wall to kill himself, but did not die; an old man lay in the sun there, and he did.

The man's sons brought him to court. The three cases were brought against the poor man, and the judge found for him in all of them, and ordered the accusers to pay for their false accusations, so that the poor man lived on the money for the rest of his life.