Newbie question : accent, special chars,...

Just a simple question:

Here is the content of a non-valid xml file :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<Item  description="voici quelques caractères accentués : é ï è à 
utilisés en français"/>

It's not valid because of the special chars inside attribute 
"description". I try to parse this file with the J-xerces 2.6.2 lib but 
I got a fatal error.
I use the following parser : org.apache.xerces.parsers.DOMParser

My question is the following :

Is there a way to parse this file, without changing the content of 
attribute description (I mean that I don't wan't to edit the file and 
replacing é by &#232; ), but I can easily change the encoding, or the 
DOMParser configuration, but how should I do this ?

Thanks

Benoit