Under the Red Robe by Stanley J. Weyman

Yes, at the great Cardinal's levee I was the only client! I stared round the room, a long, narrow gallery, through which it was his custom to walk every morning, after receiving his more important visitors. I stared, I say, from side to side, in a state of stupefaction. The seats against either wall were empty, the recesses of the windows empty too. The hat sculptured and painted here and there, the staring R, the blazoned arms looked down on a vacant floor. Only on a little stool by the farther door, sat a quiet-faced man in black, who read, or pretended to read, in a little book, and never looked up. One of those men, blind, deaf, secretive, who fatten in the shadow of the great.

Suddenly, while I stood confounded and full of shamed thought -- for I had seen the ante-chamber of Richelieu's old hotel so crowded that he could not walk through it -- this man closed his book, rose and came noiselessly towards me.