A lengthy, lively description of a masquerade in Heidelberg may be found in Meister Karl’s Sketch-book, by the American humorist, journalist, and folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland, who described the book in his Memoirs as
...an odd mélange, which had appeared in chapters in the Knickerbocker Magazine. It was titled Meister Karl’s Sketch-Book. It had no great success beyond attaining to a second edition long after; yet Washington Irving praised it to everybody, and wrote to me that he liked it so much that he kept it by him to nibble ever and anon, like a Stilton cheese or a paté de foie gras; and here and there I have known men, like the late Nicolas Trübner or E. L. Bulwer, who found a strange attraction in it, but it was emphatically caviare to the general reader. It had at least a style of its own, which found a few imitators. It ranks, I think, about pari passu with Coryatt’s “Crudities,” or lower. (p. 206)
The Sketch-Book (1855) was a fictionalized travel journal based on Leland's experiences studying and traveling in Europe as a young man. In the preface, he explained that it had been written primarily between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, which would have been from 1840 to 1849. Leland spent three years during this period studying in Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris. He mentioned the various masked balls in Heidelberg in his Memoirs:
There were four great masked balls held in Heidelberg during the winter, each corresponding to a special state of society. That at the Museum or great University Club was patronised by the elite of nobility and the professors and their families. Then came the Harmonie—respectable, but not aristocratic. Then another in a hotel, which was rather more rowdy than reputable; not really outrageous, yet where the gentlemen students “whooped it up” in grand style with congenial grisettes; and, finally, there was a fancy ball at the Waldhorn, or some such place, or several of them, over the river, where peasants and students with maids to match could waltz once round the vast hall for a penny till stopped by a cordon of robust rustics. We thought it great fun with our partners to waltz impetuously and bump with such force against the barrier as to break through, in which case we were not only greatly admired, but got another waltz gratis. We had wild peasant-dancing in abundance, and the consumption of wine and beer was something awful. (p. 154)
It's difficult for me to determine exactly how fictionalized the specific experiences he described were without doing detailed biographical research, but the tone is generally realistic, and I've no reason to believe that his description of the masquerade ball would have been wildly outside the norm for its place and time.
I first came across this description in one of the excerpts from the Sketch-Book, published in The Knickerbocker in September 1851, which I believe to be its earliest publication. The full Sketch-Book is available online at archive.org; the masked ball is described in Chapter Eight, starting here. I will quote the most interesting and significant tidbits below.
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