In response to:

In His Nightmare City from the June 28, 2007 issue

In Graham Robb’s review of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Temptation of the Impossible: Victor Hugo and Les Misérables [NYR, June 28], Alphonse de Lamartine should not have been described as a former president of France. Following the February 1848 revolution he was foreign minister in the provisional government of February–May 1848 and then belonged to the short-lived Executive Commission of the French Second Republic, whose five members acted as joint heads of state in May–June 1848.