>It baffles me. The apostrophe (') is a perfectly normal character
>and as such should never be an object of any translations, "quoting"
>or whatever... it should simply pass through just like a dot (.),
>a dash (-) or an apersand (&).

I wonder... I've sometimes received email (which I believe to have
been prepared with a word processor rather than a text editor)
where some 8-bit character appears where an apostrophe would have
been expected.  My guess is that in this case an 8-bit character
was used in the "French" message text.

I couldn't locate one right now, so I'm not sure what the 8-bit
value used was.

Cheers,
Stan