Homais is the pharmacist of Yonville, the Bovarys' neighbor: talkative, anticlerical, correspondent for the newspaper Le Fanal de Rouen, and the character who comes out on top at the end of the novel, decorated with the Legion of Honor in the book's last sentence.
When the Bovarys arrive, "what first catches the eye" in the village is his pharmacy, with the gilded sign that reads "Homais, Pharmacist." He had already been summoned before the royal prosecutor for practicing medicine illegally, so he cultivates Charles as an ally. He accuses Abbé Bournisien of hypocrisy and, at the agricultural show, calls "fanaticism" the gesture of the old servant who wins a prize and wants to give her medal to the prior. It is he who persuades Charles to operate on Hippolyte's club foot, with an eye on the newspaper article, and who suggests the trip to the opera in Rouen, where Emma meets Léon again.
It is from his pharmacy that the arsenic comes that kills Emma. After her death, he spreads the word that she took the poison thinking it was sugar, argues religion with the priest beside the body, and says he is not afraid of the corpse: "We used to make punch in the dissecting theater!" He chooses the epitaph "amabilem conjugem calcas!", runs a campaign in the newspaper against the blind man he failed to cure until the man is committed to an asylum, and drives three doctors out of the village.
His path runs from one text about himself to another: the gilded name on the sign, the article he writes and reads aloud on the night of the operation, the decoration recorded in the last line. The novel lets prosper the man who risked nothing for anyone, and that is the coldest irony of the ending.