Unable to render lowercase french accent character in mssql

Hello,

We initially save french characters using friendly html code, ie:
Ç into our db. Problems started when user tried to save actual
accented characters, ie:Ç, in the forms. The accented characters
become garbled and unable to be render correctly to views. This only
happens on lower case french characters. We tried collation but not
sure if we are even using the right one. The server is running linux,
and running Ruby 1.8.6, any help at this point will be very much
appreciated. Thanks!!!