The Noblemen of the Moorish House - Portuguese Collection 4009

The novel "Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca" embodies this ideological and romantic vein of the author through a village chronicle built on a Manichean logic and set in an idyllic rural landscape. Two worlds contrast: on one side, D. Luís' decadent aristocratic manor, on the other, Tomé da Póvoa's prosperous estate, a former employee of D. Luís, symbolising the new rising rural bourgeoisie.
The salvation of the property will result from Jorge, D. Luís' son, embracing the bourgeois value of work and Tomé's new ideas of rural management, contrasting with the antiquated ideas of Friar Januário, his father's advisor, but also with the interference of the forces of Providence conveyed by exceptional, sometimes almost angelic characters. The final alliance achieved through the marriage of Jorge and Berta, Tomé's daughter, whose father's recent fortune allowed her to be educated, embodies the ideal of merging, into a kind of new aristocracy, work, wealth, enlightenment, and nobility.

Os Fidalgos da Casa Mourisca was the last novel written by Júlio Dinis, published in 1871, after his death.