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comings and goings of the ball below, but they had not yet met anyone. Finally, around eleven o’clock, when they grew tired of watching, Ida proposed that Elisabeth select a young man, and then she, Ida, would act as go-between: “At a ball, one must speak to people and plot.” The man Elisabeth chose was Fritz Pacher. 16
    Ida first made sure that the young man was not a member of the aristocracy nor was personally acquainted with the leaders of society. Then she talked a little more without coming to the point, until finally she mentioned her friend “who is sitting up there in the gallery, all alone, and is bored to death.” She led the way upstairs to a box. There sat a lady in “unusually elegant dress” of the heaviest yellow brocade equipped with a “train that was most impractical for such purposes.” Her mask was so large that Pacher could not see either her features or her hair. “My mysterious lady was disguised to the point of unrecognizability and must have suffered a great deal from the heat.”
    The woman in red disappeared discreetly, and (according to Pacher) a “pretty dull” conversation began. They stepped to the railing and watched the carnival bustle.
    Pacher: “And while, during these totally indifferent conversations, I was tortured by the thought: Who can this be? she suddenly came out with the unexpected question: ‘I am a stranger here in Vienna, tell me, do you know the Empress, how do they like her, and what do they say, what do they think about her?’”
    Elisabeth could not have introduced the subject more awkwardly. The question made Pacher leery. Cautiously he replied, “The Empress, well, of course I know her only by sight, when she drives to the Prater in orderto go riding there. What they think of her? Actually, they do not talk about her much, because she does not like to be conspicuous in public, does not like to show herself, and busies herself primarily with her horses and dogs. I would not know anything more to say, perhaps they are not being fair to her. In any case, she is a beautiful woman.”
    The woman in yellow then asked her cavalier how old he thought she was. But when Pacher guessed Elisabeth’s true age—thirty-six—she became surly, and shortly afterward she said abruptly, “All right, you can leave now.” She addressed him in the familiar form. But the sort of treatment any courtier had to accept from an empress, Fritz Pacher refused to accept from a strange masked woman. Irritated, he countered, “How gracious you are. First you send for me to join you here, pump me for information, and then send me packing.” (In speaking to her, he, too, used the familiar form of address.) Elisabeth, who was not used to such an attitude—even the Emperor responded humbly when she expressed her wishes!—relented. Pacher thought he noticed some astonishment. In any case, she said, “All right, you can stay. Sit down, and later take me down to the dance floor.”
    Pacher:
    From that moment on, the invisible barriers between us seemed torn down. My yellow domino, until then stiff and formal, seemed transformed, and our conversation, which touched on the most diverse topics, never came to a halt again. She took my arm, gently linking hers in mine, and, chatting steadily, we strolled through the crowded ballroom and the adjacent rooms, it must have been at least two hours. I anxiously avoided paying more insistent court to her, avoided every suggestive word, just as her conversation also bore the stamp of a “lady.”
     
    The couple did not dance. Pacher noticed how ill at ease the woman in yellow felt in the crowd. “She trembled all over her body if people did not step out of her way. Clearly, she was not used to these conditions.” Her slender, tall, and extraordinarily elegant appearance caused a sensation and “visible interest among the aristocrats.” Pacher: “In particular it was the well-known sportsman Niki Esterházy, the constant companion and leader