This article discusses the relationships between the treatment of the historical burning of he Palace of Justice in Vienna on 15th July 1927 in Doderer’s novel The Demons and an expression which is connected with several characters in different settings, “a smoke denying its fire”. During the genesis of the novel, this expression undergoes various changes of its functions, and becomes for Doderer a negative symptom of the way modernity perceives reality: the rejection of natural signs and the inversion of the proverb “There is no smoke without fire”.