One more :(

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My penultimate post was about a death, and this one too : 2016 has been really a bad year. Hugues was a friend since we met in 1986 on an excavation site. He was only 18, the age where normally you end high school in France, and he was doing together a degree in German and another one in law. He was already a very bright guy with a lot of humor, always ready for a practical joke, and we kept in touch. In 1997 he has been laureate of the university of Aix-Marseille for his PhD in public law about "the reverse of courts practice in administrative law between year VII to 1997", a colossal work (200 years of jurisprudence dissected) published in 1999, and the same year he became a senior lecturer at the university of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines and registered with the bar in Paris during a few years. He wrote later a textbook about administrative proceedings which had several editions and is a reference. He launched in his college a double degree English/Law (he had a Master in German, but was also perfectly speaking English) and a master in administrative proceedings laws. I was seeing him when I was going to Paris where he had a nice appartment in the center, not far from the Seine river, and during summer on excavations sites with our girlfriends of the moment. Well, he had many girlfriends, he was always finding the right words able to melt any woman's heart in a few hours, and I was a bit envious about this talent. I am not surprised to read that he generated several vocations among his students, he was a very talented speaker, able to present with passion and humor the most boring case. I can hardly count the number of excavations we did together. Last time was in 2013, he is the second from the left on the photo I post, and I am the third. We decided to do another excavation in 2015 but it did not happened due to a death in his family. I saw him in Paris last spring and we talked several times on the phone after that, last time was in August. I called him in December, and he did not called back, unlike his habit. On January 1st I called to wish him a Happy New Year, and... the number was no more reachable. I had a bad feeling, googled his name, and the first link to come was an obituary on the website of his college where I found that he was dead in Paris on September 19th. His college has given his name to a classroom last October. I am really sad about his death. He was only 48. It is a nasty joke, Hugues.