My farm in the Drôme is pressed against a vast chthonic mass, crowned by a ring of green trees. For years, farmers have told me there is water on the land, so I resolved to bring in a dowser. One day a small mischievous man came by, he waved his pendulum, planted a stake and said: “It’s there.” We dug, dug again… and there was no water. Yet he had looked at my younger son and declared that this child had a gift. My summary of my relationship with dowsing in one scene: a man unable to find water beneath my feet, but perfectly capable of diagnosing an invisible power in a ten-year-old child.
It’s with this memory that I opened the book Brigitte Albero devoted to Henri, Farmer and Dowser (Mémoire de la Drôme, 2023). I closed it, unarmed, not converted, but deprived of my superiority. I had read Jeanne Favret-Saada with passion. When this ethnologist went to investigate sorcery in the Mayenne bocage, in The Words, Death, and Spells, she formulated a rule: there is no spectator position. One believes one can observe belief from a distance, as an enlightened curious person; one realizes that no word reaches you as long as you are not yourself caught, designated as bewitched, or disenchanted, or at least as someone it concerns. Or this dowser, by designating my son, had pulled me into the game without my realizing it. Favret-Saada never said that spells existed. She said they act. Henri Brès, the Drôme dowser, does not ask to be believed. He asks that one looks at what he has done.
Henri was born in 1937 on a farm perched high above Nyons, at the place called Pied-de-Vaux, beneath a mountain that shields the terrace from almost all winds. “I am a man of the prewar era, a man of the earth, a survivor of life,” says Henri, the narrator of Brigitte Albero’s account, and one quickly understands that these three qualities are one. His parents, René and Odette, were early resistants; the farm, at the edge of the woods, served as a transshipment point for men in the shadows. The child saw strangers pass by with small suitcases or a simple sack, with orders to be silent and say nothing. He would understand only much later the activities of his father, who left before dawn to test unconventional combat methods and returned after dinner. Childhood, cut short by the war and by hard labor, makes the youngest helpers and then apprentices very early. At fourteen, without a certificate of studies in hand, Henri leaves school for good, “rid of the suffering and the humiliation that were attached to it, but also deprived of any hope of study.” His path was laid out: he would be a farmer, and the olive tree would be his master, in his own words.
The gift, he inherited from his mother, who handled the pendulum as a matter of daily life, without paying it much heed. He, as a child, amused himself with it, borrowed it from her, watched it spin, sometimes one way, sometimes the other. Then, around twelve, he makes one: a rifle bullet tied to the end of a sausage-skin string, the pointed shape of the lead giving more precision to the thread. One more toy, he says, and what a toy, this object that “seems to have a life of its own.” Henri did not inherit a power, he cobbled together an instrument. And his entire life would proceed in this fashion, through experiments, protocols, verifications. Once he became a young man, he gave himself exercises. He draws on a sheet two circles separated by an arrow, one for the direction of the hands of the clock, the other for the opposite direction, and settles once and for all that one will signify yes and the other no. Then, he has an object hidden beneath one of several overturned bowls, closes his eyes, steps away, returns, and interrogates each bowl. He notes in what state of mind he finds himself, what images come to him, whether he is not himself, by some involuntary tension of the wrist, the author of the movement.
The first great revelation, however, does not come from water, but from game. As a child, when he accompanied adults on hunts, Henri felt a shudder, “a kind of small electric shock.” One boar-hunting day, his body jumps when he looks at a particular slope of the Vaux mountain; he falls silent, fearing mockery. The boars were on that slope; the hunters, that day, had walked a long way. From this confirmation, he derives a rule of conduct that will be his forever: to trust his feelings, to learn to observe, listen, connect the body’s reactions to the environment’s characteristics, “to accept that my body knows where the animals are before my brain and my consciousness.”
Follow one of the book’s loveliest pages: Henri makes a habit of going to watch animals live in their habitat, without hunting them. Soon, during hunts, he lets the hunters go astray and quietly points walkers to the exact spot where they can admire a family of piglets, far from rifles. His own dog takes him for a poor hunter, straining in vain; but Henri does not shoot the hare, to let it reproduce and offer the creature other wild chases. Henri—the narrator—quotes Éluard: “these pure animals that man does not frighten.” We measure here what the book has in its singularity. It is not the testimony of a healer who boasts of his powers; it is that of a man whose gift, whatever its status, has first served not to kill.
Water finally comes.
When the farm’s sources run dry, one must descend to fetch them. By the grace of an old family legend, a tunnel that would have linked the farm to a convent, the young Henri begins to dig in the stables. With a shovel, with a pick. Three meters, nothing: the tunnel was merely a myth, of the kind found all across France near convent buildings. But a neighboring dowser, called by the father, confirms that Henri’s pendulum and his mother’s indeed had located a source. So he continues. Eight meters, the rock, a meager trickle of water, enough to fill barely a can. One night, the well fills with one meter thirty of water; impossible to dig further. So be it: he attacks, alone, a horizontal gallery in the safre, that hardened mix of clay and sand that resists everything. The pick no longer bites. He tries the chisel, too slow. He takes a hatchet, carves four- to five-centimeter notches, advances by twenty centimeters on a weeknight, by a meter on a rainy Sunday.
To avoid electrocution in the dark, he runs a cable, installs a transformer, and lights himself with the tremulous glow of a twelve-volt bulb. With Yvette, his wife, a signal is agreed: when she trips the circuit breaker three times from the kitchen, it is time to come up to dinner. Everyone thinks him mad, “to dig alone in safres a gallery with a hatchet, was he not touched.” He will dig forty-two meters by hand. One rainy day, he senses water nearby, in his body, announces that it will flow that very evening. The very evening, it flows. “I’ve kept the conviction that one must always believe in oneself. You do it, and that’s that.”
On the pendulum, Henri is disarmingly prudent: he uses it only to verify numerical data, width of flow, flow rate, depth, circumference of a sheet. Once the water is found, neighbors came, then neighbors of neighbors, then communities from all over the country.
Henri never claimed this role; he received it as a succession of opportunities to practice, always refraining from making promises of any kind: “I don’t know if I will be able to find water, but I’m willing to try.” The scope of his interventions widens as time goes on. One neighbor appears one day with a burned hand, not knowing where to go in the emergency; Henri, who has never treated anyone, seats him, places his hands a few centimeters from the overheated skin, concentrates, shakes the “bad sensations” he feels in his palms toward the ground, and starts again.
Twenty minutes later, the man suffers less; he returns the next day with a jar of jam and a burn “considerably reduced.” “I knew then that I had a new string to my bow.” He learns to locate lost animals at a distance, by sweeping his pendulum over an IGN map or a photograph, delineating a zone where the master will go himself to fetch them.
He recounts, amused, how he located two shepherds stolen in the barn of a man from a neighboring village: the owner, unable to provide proof to the gendarmes, merely roamed conspicuously around the property, mimed phone calls, photographed the building, and the dogs were discreetly left in front of his house the next day. He even learns to ease, at a distance, people whom no doctor can help anymore, and he notes then one thing that, in this man who is not given to mysticism, deserves attention: “In such cases, I absolutely avoid mobilizing my rationality, because otherwise I will do nothing, as it all seems improbable.”
Here is a dowser who finds his own power incredible, and who understood that one must suspend disbelief to act. It is exactly the gesture Favret-Saada describes in her disenchanted ones. Not faith, but the putting of doubt in parentheses, the time for something to happen.
The question of words remains.
“Words fail to designate a capacity that everyone can nevertheless develop,” says Henri, the narrator of the account. How to label this gift, indeed? Is the man ultra-sensitive, hyper-intuitive, a dowser, a bone-setter, a magnetizer? To translate this refusal of any mystique, Henri-narrator says of the pendulum that it is “an unusual object […] bearing an esoteric note, a bit supernatural, as if it were an instrument of mediation with other worlds, whereas it is only a simple instrument, a kind of magnifying glass that materializes the felt senses.” A magnifying glass, not a wand of a dowser linked to the invisible.
Henri’s knowledge does not exist as testable propositions; it exists as sensations in the body, a shock that traverses him and stiffens him, palms burning, tingling that he rubs against his pants. “It is there,” he says, and this “it is there” has never claimed the status of a statement.
The book’s challenge was to put into words a knowledge that has no constituted corpus. Brigitte Albero gathered it one winter, in the kitchen, in front of thyme, lemon, and honey tea, to the slow rhythm of the clock’s pendulum. Henri reread each page and decided: “You weave, you weave, but it’s not false.” The formula is subtler than it appears. Weaving is not lying. Putting it into words adds to the experience a part that was not there, and this part does not invalidate the fact; it makes it transmissible. This is the paradox of any ethnography of the invisible: you must translate to be able to say, and say to save from oblivion.
What the book finally transmits, in fact, is not a technique, but a thesis about the living.
Henri-narrator translates it as a single energy that circulates between all beings; as long as it circulates, life shines; when one blocks, channels, or constrains it, it erupts elsewhere in dysfunctions, illnesses, catastrophes.
Thus Henri early on derives from his observations a distrust of industrial agriculture, and a rule of biblical simplicity: am I serving life, or am I destroying it? If I serve it, I carry on; if I destroy it, I stop abruptly.
His lucidity extends to himself: he eventually realized, as age came, that “this energy was not unlimited,” that the practice fatigues him and puts him at risk; a dowser who knows his own limits is already half-les envoûté (half-unenchanted) of the character people attribute to him. The Drômois, notes Brigitte Albero, stand on the balcony of the planet’s becoming, torn between the happiness of living among vineyards and olive trees and the nagging fear that all of this may disappear with the precious water, the lifelong quest. That of Henri the witness, who points to a path made of patience, humility, and stubbornness.