Note 27 — Chapter VI · The Grateful Dead and The Water of Life or Kindred Themes.

Breton VI. lacks some of the interesting traits of the variant just given, but embroiders the theme with considerable grace. The three sons of a king set out to find the princess of Hungary, who has the only remedy that will cure their father. The eldest forgets his purpose, and wastes his money in rioting. The second finds him just as he is being led to death on account of debt, ransoms him, and shares his riotous pleasures. The third brother, a humpback, goes out with little money, but on his way procures burial for a man’s corpse, which the widow has been unable to do because of lack of money to pay the priest. The next day a fox with a white tail meets him, and in return for a bit of cake leads him to the castle of a princess. There the prince resists the lady’s advances, which he suspects are derisive, and is sent to her sister’s castle, where he has the same experience. When he arrives at the castle of the third sister, he yields to her proposals, is given the remedy for his father and a magical sword, and is told how to go home. On the way he rescues his brothers from the scaffold by waving his sword, and is robbed and thrown into a well by them. Thence he is rescued by the fox, which comes at his call, and before it disappears explains that it is the ghost. Meanwhile, the older brothers have cured the king by the water of life in a phial; so when the hero comes home he is not believed. In a year and a day the princess arrives there according to her promise, and with a little son. At a feast she proclaims the truth, cuts her husband into bits, sprinkles the heap of fragments with the water of life, and marries the handsome youth who at once arises—the humpback transformed.27