it is easy to see the parallels that garnet must have drawn between his own upbringing and circumstances and those of the young man who inherited the chateau de lourps : both were orphaned at an early age , both suffered from a propensity towards ill-health ; even the physical attributes of the young duc , garnet could have believed to have been a description of the reflection he encountered staring back at him from his own mirror each morning : he even briefly experimented with a thin beard of the kind described as goatee , knowing that this facial adornment was the one preferred by des esseintes , but the results were unsatisfactory , the hair on his face growing too fair and too patchy to adequately be shaped into the style he sought .