how to see accented characters in gnome-terminal?

["Steve M. Robbins" <steven.robbins@videotron.ca>]

Howdy,

I have a tiny file with four ISO-8859-1 characters in it: "été\n".
(In case this email gets mangled, that is: e/acute-accent, t,
e/acute-accent, newline).

On the linux console, "cat" correctly shows the file.

Using xterm, "cat" correctly shows the file.

Using gnome-terminal, a blank line is output.  The system is an
up-to-date sid system, with gnome-terminal version 2.1.0-2.

What do I need to do to get accented characters to show up?
I thought I might need to choose a font with iso-8859-1 encoding,
but the font selection window shows only "Family", "Style"
and "Size" -- nothing about encoding.

What do I need to do to get accented characters to show?

Thanks,
-Steve

P.S.  You can also see the problem using "man iso-8859-1".
It works fine in xterm, but in gnome-terminal, the "Char"
and "Description" columns are blank for most entries.