Mansfeld Palace

There is not much to see, which is the point of the story. On this ground, along the river, stood one of the great houses of Renaissance Europe, and almost nothing of it survived a hundred years.

Peter Ernst von Mansfeld was made governor of Luxembourg in 1545, at twenty-eight, and held the post until he died in 1604. He was a soldier by trade and a collector of antiquities by passion, and in 1563 he and his second wife, Marie de Montmorency, bought a hermitage and its chapel, twenty houses and a stretch of land from the abbey of Neumünster and began to build. He rerouted the road from Neudorf and the river itself to make room. The palace ran to two hundred metres of façade, pushed back against the rocks so that the gardens could have the flat ground and the water; the gardens were what mattered. The site was full of springs, hence the name, La Fontaine, and he filled them with fountains, baths and a menagerie, and with antique statues, many of them Roman pieces dug up at Arlon. The centrepiece was a pool with Venus riding a whale in the middle, and animals spouting water around her. The whole estate, hunting park included, was walled in from 1590, five kilometres round.

He willed it all to the King of Spain, thinking a king would keep it up better than his heirs. Philip III took the statues, the paintings and the furniture to Madrid, and the Infanta refused the palace itself, which came with debts. Nobody maintained it. Its stones went into the Jesuit church that is now the cathedral, and the people of Clausen helped themselves to the rest to build their houses; the French siege of 1684 finished it. Two gateways survive, one with a Roman relief still set into it. When the city wanted to build a school on the site in 2003 the archaeologists went in first, and they have been digging ever since: the Venus fountain, a grotto, and the foundations of a garden pavilion are back in the daylight, and the park around you is what they have made of the governor's dream.