A coin of the greatest importance to the reader of adventure fiction set in the 17th century, the pistole was a large gold piece of Spain, also used in France, Italy and elsewhere — the same coin as the doubloon, the word preferred by pirate stories. The French Louis d'Or, of much the same size, was also called a pistole, and it seems to be this that appears in The Three Musketeers, even though the coin in question was not minted until 1640, whereas the book takes place mainly in the years 1627 and 1628; Dumas was never terribly exercised about these details.
It is not necessarily easy to understand the relative values of coinage in the books where pistoles appear, a fact which vexed my own childhood; here, then, for the benefit of a reader in a similar fix, is a basic outline: in French terms, one pistole was worth three écus, which put its value at 12 or 15 livres until the aforementioned date of 1640, when Louis XIII replaced the gold écu with a silver écu whose value was fixed at three livres, and fixed his Louis d'Or at 10 livres. The true Spanish pistole, meanwhile, was worth two escudos; one escudo was worth 16 reales, i.e. two pieces of eight, so a pistole was the equivalent of 32 reales. The ducat, another gold coin in extensive use in Spain even when not minted in the country, was worth 11 reales, so when Gil Blas sells his mule for three ducats this is just above one pistole, instead of the ten or twelve the animal was worth.
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