This contribution discusses Robert Merle’s literary narrativization, in his socially conscious novel Le propre de l’homme (1989), of the results of work carried out in the 1960s and 1970s by American psychologists and ethologists on the acquisition of human language by great apes. Robert Merle’s fictional double, his wife and children implement the “Chloe Project,” which involves welcoming a chimpanzee into the family and teaching her Ameslan so that she can communicate with humans and express her emotions and feelings. In doing so, the Dale family takes the side of non-human primates against the obscurantism of speciesists and demonstrates that access to language, although limited for great apes, can no longer be considered a human exception.