Problem inserting binary data in bytea column of UTF-8 database

Dear all,

I have a problem when trying to insert binary data in a bytea column of my
database. If the binary data contains non-UTF-8 characters, the insert
operation is rejected with a "ERROR: invalid byte sequence for encoding
"UTF8"" result.

My database uses UTF-8 encoding and I try to insert from a Windows
application written in C++ and using the psql connector to access the
database.

I reproduced a minimal example of my problem with the following psql script:

CREATE DATABASE test WITH TEMPLATE = template0 ENCODING = 'UTF8' LC_COLLATE
= 'en_US.UTF-8' LC_CTYPE = 'en_US.UTF-8';
\connect test;
CREATE TABLE test (test bytea);
insert into test (test) values (E'\xC744'::bytea);

This script generates same error when executed directly on the postgresql
server with "psql" command.

I tried different ways of encoding my binary data (hex, escape, with or
wihout the ::bytea cast) but none worked.

Ideally, I would want to find a solution that would not request to change
the database schema.

My version of postgresql is a 9.6.7, running on a debian stretch.

Many thanks in advance for your help,

Brice