To shrink like a piece of shagreen leather

[jrineakter]

Hello, dear friends! Thank you for joining me for this new episode of the Authentic French podcast. And I am really, really happy that you chose to spend about ten minutes with me today to discover a new French idiomatic expression, namely "se réduire comme une peau de chagrin". Very beautiful expression, it is very nice and it will be a pleasure for me to explain it to you.

Before that, let me remind you that for a few days only you can join us in the Authentic French Academy. I'm not going to give you the whole description here, it would be too long. You have exclusive content, lots of modules at your disposal, you have Zoom meetings with our tutors to talk, to practice, you have a reading club, you have private groups, dictations, SOS sheets, etc. The link is in the description. We only accept new members 10% of the year. And now, you have a few days to join us. Go see the first link.

That being said, we are going to discover together the different words that make up this expression “to shrink like a piece of shagreen leather”.

To reduce, the pronominal verb "to reduce", means to become smaller and smaller or to take up less and less space. If you say, "Oh, my motivation is reducing right now", it means that your saudi arabia whatsapp number data motivation is becoming smaller and smaller, weaker and weaker. So we can use it for concrete things or for images, as I just did now.

"Like" is a conjunction to indicate a way or a manner of doing. So, I think you know this word "like". We show a way of doing or a way of doing.

What is shagreen? Shagreen is a rough skin, so it's an object, a rough skin, that you use for different purposes. You can take it and rub something with a shagreen. You can of course use it to clean something, but clean it deep down, not just on the surface. But because shagreen is rough, you can rub and clean a little deeper.

So this expression, "to shrink like a piece of shagreen leather", comes from a very well-known novel by Balzac. And I would like to take this opportunity to salute our friend and tutor Julian, who is a tutor at the academy, who organizes several meetings in the reading club every week. And so Balzac is a subject that he knows well and we also have a complete module on Balzac in the academy.