Curiosities of the Self  

"In one of his recent novels, Les inconnus dans la maison, Georges Simenon describes a juvenile gang of thieves in a small French town. An unknown man is found murdered in the house of the lawyer Loursat. The lawyer defends a member of the gang, Robert Mann. The president of the court asks another member whether there was any discussion about killing the man who exploited them. Maître Loursat gets restless because no one wanted to understand the language of these young people. "They could have discussed even the minutest details of the crime and it would all have ended there. They created the drama to amuse themselves." Unfortunately, in this particular case the fantasy became reality. One of the juvenile gang really killed the man. Long before Simenon's novel, a French writer, Marquis de Sade pointed out in his Justine (1791) the danger implied in the transition from daydream to the deed:

"The dream dissipated, were one to recover one's commonsense mood, the thing would be of but mediocre import -- 'tis the story of mental wrongdoing. Everyone knows very well and it offends no one. But alas! one sometimes carries the thing a little further. What, one dares wonder, what would not be the idea's realization if its mere abstract shape thus exalted has just so profoundly moved one? The accursed reverie is vivified and its existence is a crime.""

--Curiosities of the Self (1965) by Theodor Reik

"I found the phrase "le bouton du mandarin" and "le paradoxe du mandarin" besides "tuer le mandarin." Larousse calls it a "literary allusion" and explains it in the following manner. "If it would be sufficient, in order to inherit from a very rich man whom one had never seen and with whom one had never spoken (for instance a mandarin in faraway China), to push a button that would kill him, who would hesitate to push that button?"-- Curiosities of the Self (1965) by Theodor Reik