Madame Bovary ends with Homais's victory: after Emma's suicide and Charles's death, the pharmacist prospers in Yonville, and the last sentence of the book records that he "has just received the Legion of Honor."
Emma dies in chapter 8 of Part III, poisoned by the arsenic she ate in Homais's pharmacy, after the priest's anointing and an "atrocious laugh" on hearing in the street the song of the blind man. Charles wants to bury her in her wedding dress. Afterward he writes congratulations on Léon's marriage, finds in the attic Rodolphe's letter of rupture, which he reads as a sign of a love perhaps platonic, and, in debt, sells the silverware and the furniture of the drawing room, but keeps her room as it was. Only later does he find in the writing desk Léon's letters and Rodolphe's portrait.
At the Argueil market, Charles meets Rodolphe, says he bears him no ill will and utters the phrase "It was the fault of fate!", which Rodolphe, "who had engineered that fate," finds comical. The next day, his daughter finds him dead in the arbor, with a lock of dark hair in his hand. Once everything is sold, Berthe goes to her grandmother, who dies that same year, and then to a poor aunt, who puts her in a spinning mill.
Homais, meanwhile, pursues in the newspaper the blind man whom he could not cure until he sees him locked in an asylum, drives three doctors out of the village, and wins the decoration. The ending is colder than the moral of punished vice: the lovers who calculated go on with their lives, the husband who did not calculate is destroyed, and the one who prospers is the man who risked nothing for anyone.