[fw-mvc] Zend_Config_Xml Encoding Issue

My view templates are in ISO-8859-1. I need to display a value from
the xml config file on the page. The file is in the same enoding:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>. The value contains French
é character. On the page it's displayed wrong as é and just fine if I
change encoding to UTF-8 in the browser. Thus, it looks like
Zend_Config_Xml which is used to parse the file converts it to UTF-8
internally. I cannot set the file encoding to ISO-8859-1 explicitly
because Zend_Config_Xml doesn't have a method to do it. Does anybody
have an idea how to fix this?