Breakdown of Faute d'acier, il ne peut plus le façonner, mais il en rêve encore.
il
he
mais
but
pouvoir
to be able to / can
le
him, it (masculine direct object pronoun)
encore
still, again
en
of it / of them (quantity)
ne... plus
(not) anymore / no longer
rêver de
to dream of
l'acier
the steel (m)
faute de
for lack of
façonner
to shape (craft, fashion)
Questions & Answers about Faute d'acier, il ne peut plus le façonner, mais il en rêve encore.
Why is it faute d'acier and not faute de l'acier?
After the phrase faute de (for lack of), we typically drop the partitive or definite article before the noun, just like we do with beaucoup de or besoin de. So we say faute d'acier rather than faute de l'acier.
The lesson says faute de can also be followed by an infinitive. How would that work here?
If you wanted to express an action instead of a noun, you would follow faute de directly with an infinitive. For example, Faute d'avoir de l'acier... means For lack of having steel...
In il en rêve encore, why do we use the pronoun en instead of le?
Why is the object pronoun le placed before façonner instead of before peut?
When a conjugated verb like peut is followed by an infinitive, object pronouns almost always go directly before the infinitive they logically belong to. He cannot shape it, so le goes right before façonner.
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