Crève Coeur

Twelve miles west of St. Louis, Missouri, there's a lake and a suburb called Crève Coeur. (Back there they pronounce it "creev coor".) In French, crève coeur means a painful deception, or, more literally, heart break. Crève Coeur Lake, near St. Louis, is shaped like a broken heart, and the story is that an Indian princess threw herself off the cliffs into it and drowned, after an affair with a Frenchman. I was in that area recently on business, and this is what happened to me …