take a leaf, diamonds, idiom

...take any leaf.

Outside a cafe in the bright sunlight a waitress sweeps, from the pavement into a dustpan, the fragments of a broken wine glass which look, for a moment, like a hoard of diamonds.

A Spanish idiom which has always appealed to me because I suppose I am prone to a desire to do so is "tener la sartén por el mango" which means, literally to hold the frying pan by the handle, and idiomatically, to be in the drivers seat. While drifting though a reputable French dictionary I find that the French use the same, or almost the same imagery when they say tenir la queue de la poêle