"I had no children, I did not pass on to any creature the legacy of our misery" is the last sentence of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Brás, dead, adds up what he did not achieve or have (the fame of the plaster, the ministry, marriage), compares it all to what fortune spared him, and concludes that he has "a small balance, which is the final negative of this chapter of negatives": no children.
The sentence is at once a gain and a loss. Brás closes the lineage and is relieved by it, and the "our misery" that he does not pass on is everyone's, not only his. Two readings are possible: that of full pessimism, for whom living is inheriting a misery, and that of the relief of someone who leaves no one behind to suffer.
The idea of having children appears earlier, and always as a sensation, not as a reason. When his sister Sabina decrees that he must marry, because a bachelor without children has a poor future, Brás notes: "Without children! The idea of having children gave me a start". When Virgília becomes pregnant, he exclaims "A son! A being taken from my being!" and spends the weeks conversing in thought with the embryo; on losing the embryo, he responds with the joke that there "one cannot tell Laplace from a tortoise". Thus the final balance is an absence that the dead man enters in his favor.