Emma poisons herself because she is ruined: her debt to the merchant Lheureux has become a summons for eight thousand francs within twenty-four hours, the household goods are going to be seized, and everyone from whom she asks help fails her, last of all Rodolphe, the first lover.
The debt comes from a long time of buying on credit: gifts for Rodolphe, curtains, dresses, and the Thursdays with Léon in Rouen, paid for with bills that were renewed and grew with each maturity. The text itself sums up that, from buying and signing bills, she had prepared for Lheureux "a capital that he impatiently awaited." When Emma goes to see him, he shuts the door, and the next day the bailiff takes the inventory of the house.
The round of closed doors begins. Léon returns empty-handed and, to escape, lies that he will bring the money of a friend the next day; the notary Guillaumin promises the money while holding her by the waist, and she answers "I am to be pitied, but not sold!"; Rodolphe, to whom she asks for three thousand francs, answers "I do not have them!" The narrator comments that "a request for money is the coldest and most devastating of all the storms that can fall upon love." On the way back, the situation "appeared to her like an abyss," and Emma runs to the pharmacy, asks Justin for the key to the laboratory, and eats the white powder from the blue jar.
But the novel does not reduce the gesture to money. As she leaves Rodolphe's castle, Emma no longer remembers the cause of her state, "the question of money," and suffers "only because of love." The note she leaves Charles begins with "Do not accuse anyone…" The debt and the refusals are the concrete mechanism of her death, and they expose that the men who possessed her risk nothing for her.