Quote from http://henkelmann.eu/2011/01/06/actuarius_release_note
Better handling of escapes than PegDown: PegDown does not escape special HTML characters like <, >, &, " and ' in normal text paragraphs, just in code blocks.
Maybe if>they are¬ "stand-alone"?
Well, I don't think so :) (at least not as of pegdown 0.9.2!)
Here is a simple \ that should be left alone