garbage chars when pasting French chars into emacs

[ken]

Just to be comprehensive I'll state at the outset that I'm using Linux 
(CentOS 5.7), so this is the environment emacs is working in.  From a 
shell I get this:

$ set|grep -i lang
LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Now I pull up a webpage with some French on it: 
<http://www.wikilivres.info/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty>.  Examining the 
source code of this page, I see at the top:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

So this page is presented in UTF-8.

Firefox is also set to present pages in UTF-8: View -> Character 
Encoding -> UTF-8

But when I copy and paste the text from "Francais" to "invisible, 1964)" 
inclusive, many of the characters aren't rendered correctly; I get 
"garbage" characters in their stead, e.g., the second-to-last line 
appears something like this:

    * L^[$(B!G^[$(C)+^[(Bil et l^[$(B!G^[(Besprit, Gallimard, 1960

Other lines are improperly rendered also.

I'd like to fix this.  And if possible understand why this doesn't work, 
so I might be able to diagnose these problems for myself.

BTW, I'm using GNU Emacs 21.4.1 (i686-redhat-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d 
scroll bars) of 2011-04-28 on builder10.centos.org

Yes, it's an older version, but it's the latest from the CentOS 5.7 
distribution.  (Blame Red Hat.)


Thanks for your help.