Known to all literary men and all artists, intimate with the palette and familiar with the desk, he was the very Asmodeus of the arts.

He would sell you cigars for a column of your newspaper, slippers for a sonnet, fresh fish for paradoxes; he would talk, for so much an hour, with the people who furnished fashionable gossip to the journals.
He would procure you places for the debates in the Chambers, and invitations to parties.

He lodged wandering artistlings by the day, week, or month, taking for pay, copies of the pictures in the Louvre.
The green room had no mysteries for him.

He would get your pieces into the theater, or yourself into the boudoir of an actress.

He had a copy of the "Almanac of Twenty Five Thousand Addresses" in his head, and knew the names, residences, and secrets of all celebrities, even those who were not celebrated.
A few pages copied from his waste book, will give a better idea of the universality of his operations than the most copious explanation could.
"March 20, 184--." "Sold to M.L----, antiquary, the compass which Archimedes used at the siege of Syracuse.