Another possible reason for what appears to be changes character (in the story and the characters themselves) is that this was a collaborative work between Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet (not their first nor last), and also Gatien de Courtilz. From Richard Pevear's introduction:
Quote:
A year later, [Maquet] brought Dumas a project for another collaboration: the plan of a novel involving Richelieu, Louis XIII, Anne d’Autriche, and the Duke of Buckingham, which eventually became The Three Musketeers.
[...]Their relations, and Dumas’s work with other collaborators, have given rise to accusations of exploitation and mercantilism on Dumas’s part. As early as 1845, he was attacked in a crude pamphlet entitled The Novel Factory: Alexandre Dumas and Co. [...] Maquet himself never accused Dumas of any exploitation or unfairness (though he did lodge a complaint later about Dumas’s habit of spending his collaborator’s royalties along with his own). Maquet knew the crucial importance of Dumas’s contribution to their work and acknowledged it openly [...]
They would draw up the plan of a novel together. Then Maquet would do the initial development, including historical research, producing a rough draft which he would turn over to Dumas. Dumas would rework Maquet’s material, expanding it, recasting it, removing characters, adding others, elaborating the plot, and above all imparting to it the movement, the invention, the life of his own unmistakable style. Art is cruel but just, as someone once said. Ninety pages of Maquet’s first draft of The Three Musketeers have been preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and are included in the Garnier edition. A comparison with the finished version shows just how important Dumas’s reworking was. Maquet’s Musketeers would have been forgotten at once; Dumas’s touch transformed them into immortals.
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Maybe what we're seeing is the conflict between two different authors' ideas of what the characters and story were.