your code lacks of the unavoidable use strict; use warnings; and the name of variables seems to change during the script..

..but anyway LWP::UserAgent retrieves correctly the é as you can see in this short oneliner output(be aware of windows double quotes):

perl -MLWP::UserAgent -e "print LWP::UserAgent->new->get('http://perlm
+onks.org/index.pl?node_id=11144443')->decoded_content" | grep cory

     It is the <em>coryphées</em> should fear him,
    It is the <em>coryph&#65533;es</em> should fear him
[download]

L*

PS I have semplified the above code, same results btw