On May 30, 1431, Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in the marketplace of Rouen. She was nineteen years old. The charge was heresy. The trial that condemned her had been conducted by Bishop Pierre Cauchon, a man with political reasons to want her dead, before a court packed with his allies. Joan had asked repeatedly to appeal to the Pope. The request was denied. She was given no proper legal defense. The verdict was never in doubt.

Isabelle Romée was a farmer's wife from a small village in Lorraine. She had five children. She had taught her daughter Joan to spin, to pray, to run a household. When Joan began hearing voices as a teenager and announced she intended to lead the armies of France, Isabelle had tried to stop her, even arranging a marriage to keep her home. It did not work: Joan went anyway. What Isabelle thought as she watched events unfold over the following years is not fully recorded. What is recorded is what she did afterward. Joan's father, Jacques, is said to have died of grief in the months following the execution. Isabelle did not die of grief. She moved to Orléans in 1440, where the city granted her a pension in recognition of what her daughter had done in lifting the English siege eleven years earlier. And she began working.

Quietly at first, then with increasing urgency, she started gathering evidence. She collected statements from priests, neighbors, childhood friends, soldiers, and anyone who had known Joan or witnessed her trial. She traveled. She wrote letters. She petitioned Rome. The Church that had burned her daughter was the only institution with the authority to clear her name. Isabelle knew that and pursued it anyway. She petitioned Pope Nicholas V. When he did not act, she continued. When Pope Calixtus III took office, she petitioned again. This time, with the support of the chief inquisitor of France, Jean Bréhal, who had been building his own legal case for years, the wheels began to move.
She was advised by powerful men not to proceed. One senior churchman told her in 1455 to abandon the claim. She ignored him.

On November 7, 1455, Isabelle Romée traveled to Paris. She was somewhere between sixty-five and seventy years old. She walked into Notre-Dame Cathedral, which was packed with hundreds of people who had heard that a mother was attempting to plead a case for a daughter dead for twenty-four years. She walked up the aisle to where the papal commissioners were seated. She threw herself at their feet, held up the papal rescript granting the inquiry, and wept. And then she delivered her speech. She had prepared it carefully. It began with the words she had lived with for two and a half decades:
"I had a daughter born in lawful wedlock, whom I had furnished worthily with the sacraments of baptism and confirmation and had reared in the fear of God and respect for the tradition of the Church. She never thought, spoke, or did anything against the faith. Certain enemies had her arraigned in a religious trial. Despite her disclaimers and appeals, both tacit and expressed, and without any help given to her defense, she was put through a perfidious, violent, iniquitous, and sinful trial. The judges condemned her falsely, damnably, and criminally, and put her to death in a cruel manner by fire." She ended with four words: "I demand her rehabilitation."

The court was visibly moved. The accounts say that so many of those present joined aloud in the petition that it seemed one great cry for justice broke from the entire crowd. The trial that followed took months. More than a hundred witnesses were called. Many of the men who had participated in the 1431 condemnation trial now conveniently claimed they could not remember the details. The evidence of judicial corruption, political manipulation, procedural fraud, and deliberate cruelty was laid out in detail. The court found that the original trial had been conducted in bad faith, that the charges were fraudulent, that Joan had been denied basic legal protections, and that the verdict had been driven by personal and political vendetta rather than any genuine finding of heresy. On July 7, 1456, the conviction was declared null and void. Joan of Arc was formally exonerated. The judges of 1431 were the ones named as having behaved criminally.

Isabelle was present for the verdict. She was present three weeks later when the city of Orléans held a banquet to celebrate. She had spent most of the intervening twenty-five years fighting for this moment. The archbishop who had told her to give up her claim the year before was among those who had to sit with the outcome. Isabelle Romée died on November 28, 1458, two years after her daughter's name was cleared. She had not rested until it was done. The surname Romée, which she carried, is believed by some historians to have been earned by a pilgrimage to Rome she made earlier in her life, on foot, across mountains and through bandit country, for reasons now unknown.

Joan of Arc was canonised as a saint by the Catholic Church in 1920. The path to that recognition ran directly through the work her mother did, statement by statement, letter by letter, petition by petition, for twenty-five years after the fire went out.