umlauts, accents in (x)emacs

[Matt Price <matt.price@utoronto.ca>]

Hey everyone,

I occasionally write in french and german and just recently noticed
that umlauted and accented characters which now work fine in bash,
openoffice, and mozilla, do not work in emacs or xemacs. 

I can't remember whether they ever worked for me in emacs.  is there a
trick -- something special that needs to go in my .init.el, for
instance?  I've recently been messing with my config files, so I may
have screwed something up -- but the accents don't seem to work for me
on any of my machines, so I suspect the problem is more fundamental
than that.  

anyway, thanks,

matt