That error would arise if the file containing the script is not written/stored as utf8 data -- the accented character would need to be a two byte sequence 0xc3 0xa9 in order to be the utf8 version of é.

0xE9 is the cp1252/iso-8859-1 (single-byte) version, and having that form of the character in a script file that also has "use utf8" is a problem with the file, not with perl.