In Madame Bovary, money decides the ending: Emma's romanticism is paid for on credit, the debt grows at the same pace as the tedium of her love affairs, and it is the demand for payment, and not a cheated husband or a priest, that leads her to death.
In Part II, the merchant Lheureux plants credit without charging anything: "there's no hurry, whenever you like." The gifts Emma gives Rodolphe generate a bill of two hundred and seventy francs, and, during her illness, Charles signs for Lheureux a bill of exchange and a promissory note that come to "one thousand two hundred and fifty" francs.
In Part III, debt takes over the book. In the midst of mourning for Charles's father, Lheureux suggests the power of attorney: "with a power of attorney it would be simple, and then we could do a few little deals." Emma buys curtains, signs four bills of one thousand francs, which the banker Vinçart discounts, and, on Thursdays with Léon in Rouen, almost always covers the expense her lover cannot pay on his own. The summons for eight thousand francs arrives, and in the inventory of the house Emma's life is laid open "like a corpse undergoing an autopsy." She asks Léon, the notary Guillaumin and Rodolphe for money, and after the last refusal she swallows the arsenic.
The narrator says what money does to love: her request to Rodolphe is "the coldest and most devastating of all storms." And the ending settles the accounts with irony. Charles sells the silverware and the furniture and, after his death, once everything is sold, "twelve francs and seventy-five centimes" remain; the daughter of the woman who spent on luxury goes to work in a spinning mill; and the man who risked nothing, Homais, is decorated.