The Letter É

I am programmatically generating my .hhc file from Excel VBA and in English, everything is perfect.  When I try to create my French one, that's when it implodes.

For example, I have the following sample page which works and shows up correctly in RoboHelp in the Table Of Contents pane:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<toc version="1.0">
<properties imagewidth="16" windowstyles="8388610" exwindowstyles="256">
</properties>
<item name="é" link="First_Topic.htm">
</item>
</toc>

Then I have this one, which shows nothing - the pane is completely blank:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<toc version="1.0">
<properties imagewidth="16" windowstyles="8388610" exwindowstyles="256">
</properties>
<item name="é" link="First_Topic.htm">
</item>
</toc>

No, you're not seeing things - they are identical in multiple text editors, etc.  Only when I do a binary diff on the two files do I see that the one that works doesn't actually have é in it, it's é

When I try to use those characters to replace the é (and all of the other character pairs for the other special French characters) when programmatically generating it, it doesn't work, it'll show the two characters in the topic name.  I can copy the character and manually edit the Page Title in the TOC within RoboHelp and it displays correctly and saves as the same character.

Any suggestions?