Personally, if my developer charged $1000 for what I see at jolie-beauty.com (one page with pretty much no content whatsoever), then I would definitely go somewhere else indeed.
Holding him accountable is a different story, as you said there's no contract or anything.
I think this is more a question of the developer having the proper files or not, than an actual technical question. If the database is gone, you have to try and figure out why that is. Perhaps it's still there but the developer is clueless.
Was the site always hosted by him?