ALBRIZZI (Comtesse), a friend, in 1820, at Venice, of the celebrated melomaniac, Capraja. [Massimilla Doni.]

ALDRIGGER (Jean-Baptiste, Baron d’), born in Alsace in 1764.  In 1800 a banker at Strasbourg, where he was at the apogee of a fortune made during the Revolution, he wedded, partly through ambition, partly through inclination, the heiress of the Adolphuses of Manheim.  The young daughter was idolized by every one in her family and naturally inherited all their fortune after some ten years.  Aldrigger, created baron by the Emperor, was passionately devoted to the great man who had bestowed upon him his title, and he ruined himself, between 1814 and 1815, by believing too deeply in “the sun of Austerlitz.”  At the time of the invasion, the trustworthy Alsatian continued to pay on demand and closed up his bank, thus meriting the remark of Nucingen, his former head-clerk:  “Honest, but stoobid.”  The Baron d’Aldrigger went at once to Paris.  There still remained to him an income of forty-four thousand francs, reduced at his death, in 1823, by more than half on account of the expenditures and carelessness of his wife.  The latter was left a widow with two daughters, Malvina and Isaure. [The Firm of Nucingen.]

ALDRIGGER (Theodora-Marguerite-Wilhelmine, Baronne d’), nee Adolphus.  Daughter of the banker Adolphus of Manheim, greatly spoiled by her parents.  In 1800 she married the Strasbourg banker, Aldrigger, who spoiled her as badly as they had done and as later did the two daughters whom she had by her husband.  She was superficial, incapable, egotistic, coquettish and pretty.  At forty years of age she still preserved almost all her freshness and could be called “the little Shepherdess of the Alps.”  In 1823, when the baron died, she came near following him through her violent grief.  The following morning at breakfast she was served with small pease, of which she was very fond, and these small pease averted the crisis.  She resided in the rue Joubert, Paris, where she held receptions until the marriage of her younger daughter. [The Firm of Nucingen.]

ALDRIGGER (Malvina d’), elder daughter of the Baron and Baroness d’Aldrigger, born at Strasbourg in 1801, at the time when the family was most wealthy.  Dignified, slender, swarthy, sensuous, she was a good type of the woman “you have seen at Barcelona.”  Intelligent, haughty, whole-souled, sentimental and sympathetic, she was nevertheless smitten by the dry Ferdinand du Tillet, who sought her hand in marriage at one time, but forsook her when he learned of the bankruptcy of the Aldrigger family.  The lawyer Desroches also considered asking the hand of Malvina, but he too gave up the idea.  The young girl was counseled by Eugene de Rastignac, who took it upon himself to see that she got married.  Nevertheless, she ended by being an old maid, withering day by day, giving piano lessons, living rather meagrely with her mother in a modest flat on the third floor, in the rue du Mont-Thabor. [The Firm of Nucingen.]