While still a high school student, Lafargue was an active member of a group of young poets in Toulouse and published his first collection in 1897, titled "Le Jardin d'où l'on voit la Vie" (The Garden from Which One Sees Life), containing poems influenced by symbolism and the style of Verlaine.

A second collection, "L'âge d'or" (The Golden Age), was published in 1903, marking a departure from his earlier influences towards a style closer to the emerging literary naturism.

Despite his fondness for rustic life in the countryside, Lafargue alternated between extended stays in Toulouse and Paris, where he pursued a career as an art critic and contributed to numerous newspapers.

Encouraged by his friends, Lafargue eventually published a new book in 1922, "La Belle Journée" (The Beautiful Day), a collection of poems written nearly 15 years earlier.

His origins are primarily known through a document he wrote himself, preserved in the municipal library of Toulouse: he hailed from a bourgeois family whose ancestors amassed wealth in the textile industry.

He became a student at the Toulouse boys' high school, where he befriended Maurice Magre, Jean Viollis, and Henri Jacoubet, who became his first literary companions, along with Emmanuel Delbousquet, whom he met around the same time.

[1][4] Lafargue and his friends gathered for evenings where they read their poems, discussed new literary trends, and launched a magazine founded by Delbousquet in 1892: "Essais de Jeunes" (Youth Essays), quickly replaced by "L'Effort".

[9][10] Lafargue notably contributed to the recognition of the young Toulouse poet Éphraïm Mikhaël, who died prematurely, and led a support committee for the erection of a monument in his honor.

Back in Toulouse, Lafargue often receives his poet friends, including Delbousquet, Viollis, Déodat de Séverac, and Joseph Bosc.

He meets several artists during this trip: Charles Maurras in Martigues, Frédéric Mistral in Maillane, Émile Pouvillon in Lamothe-Capdeville, and Aristide Maillol, still unknown but with whom he becomes friends, in Banyuls.

[21] Still in 1903, he publishes the collection "L'âge d'or" where he evokes his mother and sister, his native region and its landscapes, as well as his idyll with his future wife, Lydie Gabrielle Vayssié:[22]"Her gaze is deep as water in the woods.

[20][21] For several years, the couple alternates between stays in Toulouse and Paris, where Lafargue mainly pursues a career in the press: he collaborates, among others, with L'Ermitage [fr] (alongside Marie Dauguet, Charles Guérin, or Léo Larguier),[24] La Muse française, and Les Marges (which includes Apollinaire among its writers),[25][26] and participates in the founding of La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1908.

[14] From 1909 to 1911, he frequents the restaurant of La Mère Coconnier, rue Lepic in Montmartre, where he meets Apollinaire, Viollis, Émile Vuillermoz, and Eugène Montfort.

[27] He also continues to write for Toulouse and regional magazines, such as Le Pays de France, where he publishes "Social Notes" with a socialist and Dreyfusard tendency.

[33] He is buried in the Terre-Cabade cemetery, as he had already expressed in a poem in 1903[36]:"One day, when my sons have closed my eyes, It is on this hill with its harmonious folds That I want, O my mortal body, for you to rest,

[42][43] It depicts a nude woman, a favorite subject of the sculptor — heavily influenced by Maillol, whom he met through Lafargue — with a medallion portrait of the poet.

"Marc Saint-Saëns depicts him in his fresco representing the Occitan Parnassus, in the main reading room of the Library of Study and Heritage of Toulouse.

Another set of manuscripts — containing correspondence, notebooks, poems, and personal documents — is acquired in 1992, and its addition to the collections "is dictated by the local renown of this Toulouse poet, the singer of his city and his country".

[19] His work also includes poems published in the press, an "Ode aux jeunes filles de Vendôme" composed for a competition in 1924, as well as a translation of Virgil's "Bucolics".

He evokes his childhood in nostalgic verses influenced by Verlaine and symbolism, but also shows his attachment to nature, which will be a constant in his work:[49]"On the chilly sunset flees a flight of passage The evening has the sweetness of dying November And clothes a troubled landscape in a vapor The silver of a star shines through the veil of the pond."

— "Le Jardin d'où l'on voit la Vie" (1897)His second collection, "L'âge d'or," contains more refined poems closer to naturism.

[32] His style continues to simplify, and his classical influences — Ronsard, André Chénier — become stronger in "La Belle Journée," a collection written in 1908 but not published until 1922.

In both, equal sincerity, the same concern to express the impulses of a life passionate heart that is thrilled by the magnificence of nature, the charm of gardens, the beauty of women".

[55] He shows curiosity about other forms of art, notably sculpture, and leaves unfinished books at his death about his friend Aristide Maillol and François Lucas, whom he greatly admires.

He writes numerous poems about Toulouse, of which he knows every nook and cranny and enjoys showing to his friends with "a genuine, almost childish joy" according to André Magre[34]:"In the light mists, the city with its golden bricks With its domes and towers, its pink steeples Awakens in the dawn, O river, on your bank