Character Set in Default Font?

It's not a big deal, but I'd like to use some acute accents in the text of my menus. I'm not sure what the correct way to do this is, but I tried in my .cpi to put the characters in the

When my acute 'i' (which is like alt-0237) didn't work, I noticed that the guy who did the Meteo plugin had acute accents. So I tried all of the vowels with acute and umlauts (which covers 99% of what I need for this language.) I get a funny right-handed angle, it looks like a line going up from bottom-middle to center, then from center to middle-right:
_
|

Something like that...what's the right way to get this working?

EDIT:

I just popped open the Meteo source to peek: Météo - France

It's done with '& # 2 3 3 ;' (take out the spaces)

That looks simple enough!