M. Butterfly - Quote Sandwich - "My name is Rene Gallimard - also known as Madame Butterfly."

Irony in His Blood
We first get a sense for who Rene is when he reveals his love for the opera Madama Butterfly. The first line he speaks in the first scene of the play is "Butterfly, Butterfly..." He's serving time for treason in a prison on the outskirts of Paris. He once lived the international life of a French Diplomat; now he's confined to live out his life in a tiny dark prison cell. He has nothing to live for. Everything he has ever had has been taken away from. 

The only thing that keeps him going is this fantasy he has for Madama Butterfly. It dampers his reality.
 The story gives him hope. He shares it with his fellow prisoners: "My name is Rene Gallimard - also known as Madame Butterfly." 
Rene became hooked on the romance of the opera Madame Butterfly. It's about a young Japanese geisha girl who devotes her life to an American sailor. She just about lives for him. In fact, even when he disappears for three years without a word, she continues to love him. When Cho-Cho-san - that's the girl's name - finds out that her American sailor has married a white woman, she can't control herself. She kills herself with her uncle's knife.
 Rene thinks the opera story is so beautiful. From witnessing Cho-Cho-san's passion, Rene becomes obssessed with the Asian woman. He wants to experience the same feeling of having a woman submit to him the way Cho-Cho-san submitted to her American Sailor. That's the "irony in his blood": At the end of the play, we learn that Rene has lost his woman. She was a man. Now he's dressed in make-up and a wig - like a woman. After he tells his audience his real name, Rene Gaillamard, but now he reveals he is "Madama Butterfly." This is right before he drives a knife into his body. Clearly, Rene longed for the life he saw in Madama Butterfly, but I bet it just wasn't this one.