Ah; found it. Somehow toggle-enable-multibyte-characters was switched off; I'm not sure how that happened. Curiously, it doesn't seem to work in this email buffer, though. 

torys.anderson@gmail.com (Tory S. Anderson) writes:

> I wrote out notes a whiel ago and used the TeX input mode to add special/accented characters. But now when I load the file, they are all represented as code symbols:
>
> 	Distinguishes between fabula and sjuz†et. 
>
> Is there any way to recover/display these properly?
> - Tory
>
> PS: even trying to send this message it yells at me about "unprintable characters." In case they don't come through, I see "sjuz\314\206et"