coding system

[Olive]

I am confused about emacs and coding system. If I evaluate the following 
function

(read-event "Press a key: ")

and press the é key (e acute); I see 2281 in the echo aera. If I want to 
rebind the é key the command which works is

(global-set-key [2281] 'foo)

the command

(global-set-key "é" 'foo)

does not work.

However it seems that the coding system for keyboard input is latin-1. 
This is a unibyte coding system; why does emacs see a multibyte charater 
when I press é? To what corresponds this 2281?

beginnning of the output of (describe-coding-system):

Coding system for saving this buffer:
  Not set locally, use the default.
Default coding system (for new files):
  1 -- iso-latin-1 (alias: iso-8859-1 latin-1)
Coding system for keyboard input:
  1 -- latin-1 (alias of iso-latin-1)
Coding system for terminal output:
  1 -- latin-1 (alias of iso-latin-1)
Defaults for subprocess I/O:
  decoding: 1 -- iso-latin-1 (alias: iso-8859-1 latin-1)
  encoding: 1 -- iso-latin-1 (alias: iso-8859-1 latin-1)