The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas ends with a tally of negatives: Brás, dead, adds up what he did not become and did not have, and finds a small balance, that of not having had children. It is the last sentence of the book.
In the final chapters the losses pile up. The ministry Brás expected does not come, and the chapter that should have recounted it consists only of dots. He loses his seat as deputy and founds an opposition newspaper that dies within months, when Lobo Neves also dies, on the eve of becoming minister; Virgília mourns him truly. At her request, Brás sends Dona Plácida to the Misericordia, where she wakes up dead. On the same day he sees Marcela die in a hospital and finds Eugênia, lame and sadder, in a tenement, where she refuses his alms. Quincas Borba returns demented and aware of it and dies in Brás's house, repeating that pain is an illusion.
The last chapter, "Of Negatives", says that Brás did not reach the fame of the plaster, was not minister, was not caliph, and did not know marriage. Beside these lacks, fortune spared him the bread earned by sweat, the death of Dona Plácida, and the semi-dementia of Quincas Borba. Taken together, anyone would imagine he came out even with life, but he finds a small balance, the final negative: "I had no children, I did not pass on to any creature the legacy of our misery."